Interesting that on one hand the valuation of these AI providers is based on the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future, on the other hand almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out. Hard to reconcile.

Personally I'm also experiencing a bit of AI hangover after using it a lot in my own open-source projects. I find it's a bit like taking drugs (not that I have much experience with that) in the sense that in the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess.

I now plan to use these tools less for extensive feature development and more for planning, debugging and narrow refactoring where I can put very strict guardrails on them. I'd still say it accelerates my work but not by a factor of 10, more like 1.5-3 (which is still a lot) given the care you need to ensure what is being built is actually good. For what I really like these tools is that I need less mental focus to do coding, but on the other hand I have this new kind of fatigue of being in a constant chat loop with a machine and trying to get it to do stuff based on natural language, never knowing how it will interpret what I write and wrote before. In that sense, these tools don't feel satisfying, it's like operating a machine where you try to push some buttons to get it to do something but the internal wiring changes all the time so you never know exactly what a given button combination will do and you have to figure it out by watching the machine and constantly adapting.

I think drugs are actually a great analogy. An initial feeling of "oh my god I have superhuman capabilities" followed by a hangover of "ohno I have created a mess". Especially with AI sycophancy where it's like "Great idea!" all the time. (I am well aware most my ideas are not great, thanks). Honestly, even the way people talk about like vibe coding on their phones while they're with their kids or something, it almost sounds like a compulsion.

The key problem is that traditionally, OSS contributions were self-selecting. Basically, to create a PR, you had to be invested in the project. To create a contribution of value, you had to understand the codebase, the conventions, engage a little with the project, and generally the folks doing it are doing so because they like the project, or because they are scratching a specific itch they have etc.

What AI unlocks is contributions from folks who are not at all involved in the project, and creating a PR is no longer enough to clear the gate of “this person is at least somewhat interested in the success of the project”.

AI is a force multiplier when wielded properly, but as an OSS maintainer, it’s easy to drown in prolific, low value “contributions” from folks who don’t care about the project.

> in the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess.

My suggestion would be that instead of sometime later, review incrementally as part of your process. Treat AI as just the tool for writing, just as if you handed it off to a junior. Replace "junior" with "AI" in the SDLC and keep everything else the same.

Moving fast was a huge moat for a long time, but now moving fast is easy. Quality might be the new moat.

Important to note that fast never meant much to open source and for good reason.

I've very much come around to this perspective as well

Our current generation of AI tools still seems to be very much not there when you really try and use it's output

There's a problematic dopamine dynamic as well where it's far too easy to reach for an AI when doing some work or starting a new project

I'm currently trying to dopamine hack my brain back to preferring to handwriting the majority of my code as opposed to reaching for claude

Time will tell if this is just a phase and it will get better or we'll need some sort of LLMs-anonymous

  the assumption that all code (and everything else producing digital artefacts) will be written using AI in the near future,

> almost all popular open source projects fight to keep AI contributions out

Godot, Zig, who else? Most major OSS projects I know are openly welcoming high quality AI contributions, not fighting to keep them out.

> the moment I'm using these tools I feel great and powerful, writing features in a span of hours that would've taken me weeks to write by hand. But inevitably some time later I will look at the code and notice all the subtle cracks and inconsistencies the tool introduced, and despair a bit at the mess.

Very relatable. I wasted 2 weeks of full time effort earlier this year building a helper library with Sonnet. It was the first (and the last) time I vibe coded something. Once I was satisfied with it, I began using the library and within 2 days I was certain it was all for nothing. I will never get those 2 weeks back, but a lesson has been learnt.

I don't think it's that hard to reconcile. The tools are being massively oversold and we are in a bubble. I think things will settle down to a reasonable middle ground in ~2 years as the checks being written right now start coming due and we are forced to figure out what they actually are and aren't good at. Infinite money distorts markets, it's currently not a good time to be judging these things for the long term perspective.

I have recently updated zed to the latest version which has parallel agents and all the other brainrot.

I gave it an innocuous 2 sentence prompt, telling it to help me implement it, by building X first.

It produced code, and it was a big wall of code, which I expected. What I didn't expect is that the zed developers completely threw out the accept/reject workflow since Codex is no longer directly integrated into zed anymore.

Instead of the agent patiently waiting for my acceptance, it just kept going, it automatically ran cargo test, kept iterating like a dozen times, running cargo test and editing the code. Since I was in the middle of a big refactor, I kept a dozen compile errors as a reminder. It tried to "fix" these compile errors.

Then it proceeded to keep going even further and use the code to finish a file that was supposed to use the new code in the future.

The end result is as expected: It produced completely unusable garbage code that no sane person would sign off on and not just that, it used this garbage code and kept going with it, building more garbage on top of a garbage foundation. It also silenced the errors by producing more garbage code.

I'm the type of person that thinks the "accept always" button for specific commands is the dumbest idea ever [0], but they went one step further and basically made the agentic coding experience so bad it became unusable overnight. At this point I'd rather abandon agentic coding and go back to copy paste development with a chat interface.

[0] it's either accept or reject, everything else is stupid