I really don't like the narrative of 'X is killing Y', or 'Z is dead' Everything being treated as an existential threat.

I'm also not particularly fond of the other extreme of toxic positivity where any problem is just a challenge and everybody is excited to take them on.

Once seems to understate the level of agency people have and the other seems to overstate.

The world is changing. Adapting does seem to be the rational approach.

I don't think Open Source is being killed but it does need to manage the current situation in a way that provides the best outcome.

I have been thinking that there may be merit in AI branches or forks. Open source projects direct any AI produced PRs to the AI branch. Maintainers of that branch curate the changes to send upstream. The maintainers of the original branch need not take an active involvement in the AI branch. If the AI branch is inadequately maintained or curated, then upstream simply receives no patches. In a sense it creates an opportunity for people who want to contribute. It produces a new area where people can compartmentalise their involvement without disrupting the wider project. This would lower the barrier of entry to productively supporting an open source project.

I doubt the benefit of resume-padding will persist long in an AI world. By the very nature of their act, they are showing what they are claiming to do is unremarkable.

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milowata 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I actually started writing a very similar essay, but the hyperbole got too out of hand – open source isn't dying anytime soon.

I do think that SDKs and utility-focused libraries are going to mostly go away, though, and that's less flashy but does have interesting implications imo.

https://meelo.substack.com/p/a-mild-take-on-coding-agents

	▲	Lerc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm inclined to agree somewhat about libraries. I'm not entirely certain that it is a bad thing. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say libraries will change in form. There is a very broad spectrum of what libraries do. Some of the very small may just become purpose written inline code. Some of the large, hated-but-necessary libraries might get reduced into manageable chunks if people who use them can utilise AI to strip them down to the necessary component. Projects like that are things that are a lot of work for an individual that make it easier to just bite the bullet and use the bloated mass library. Getting an opportunity to make an AI do that drudge work might lower the threshold that some of those things will be improved. I also wonder about the idea of skills as libraries. I have already found that I am starting to put code into skills for the AI to use as templates for output. Developing code in this way would let you add the specific abilities of a library to any skill supporting AI. A simple is this https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/Lerc/JustS... which was generated by a skill that contains the source for the image decoders within the skill itself.