I believe a lot of people will find out with AI that most people don't have very original ideas. And that the limitations we encounter while realizing those ideas enable us to grow it into a good art piece or product. Due to being forced to consider if the effort of working around the limitations is worth it. And then put in the effort to realize something that approaches the initial idea as close as possible. Instead of instantly being able to realize the first idea in you mind without any obstacles.
Software still feels like this grand exploration to me—what's the best way to use a computer? What's the best way to express a program?—and a hackable text editor epitomizes that ethos (though I'm partial to neovim myself). Every time I install a plugin I feel like I'm participating in a clinical trial of UX design.
I think a lot of us feel this and the community will have to solidify the ethos that trying out other people's software is noble and healthy, exposing you to other peoples' ideas, even if it's actually harder than vibecoding.
With vibe coded tools you know what you got, and they're easy to adapt if you need to.
Why use OSS then? Because of the community—you will get ideas from using other people’s software that you wouldn’t get from staying in your bubble. OSS projects therefore ought to see themselves as a community first and a software project second. Do other people in the gnome community like the change? Why did the maintainers make it? You have less reason to use gnome than ever, but if you do use gnome 3, you’ll be trying out software that (a) somebody thought was a good idea, and (b) you definitely wouldn’t have vibe-coded for yourself. So that’s something.
Open source projects have always had forks, public and private. The ability to fork a project and use your own version of it privately, without needing permission or buy-in from others, has always been an explicitly valued aspect of open source software. If it was always seen as a good thing before, why do we see it differently now?
I think the reason is an implicit assumption that the production of more unshared work means that less work will be shared. But I don't see why that would be true. We could just as easily, and more likely in my view, see more work shared with the world at the same time we see more work not shared with the world. The incentives for cooperation remain, even as it becomes easier to work alone.
Has anyone made a persuasive argument to the contrary, or provided evidence? It seems like the main problem AI has created for open source projects is an avalanche of bad PRs, not a drying up of good contributions.
Writing code shouldn't merely be about accomplishing a goal, but making deliberate and good decisions that lead to more good decisions with increasing ease and clarity. It's no different than any other type of planning, engineering, or architecting. FOSS demands this more than any other genre of software because it's made collaboratively.
I think AI is just too irresistible for the reckless and dumb developers who were, unfortunately, always the majority in our line of work. Now we don't have to guess at that fact anymore or be afraid of being judged as arrogant for saying it. Now we know. These developers don't bring anything to the table. The problem of rejecting garbage PRs is far from new.
But who knows, maybe AI will get good enough to meet your standards even though most humans don't.
Not every project has to be "elitist", but if the goal is to do the best work to serve a particular use case you can call it whatever you want. It doesn't change the fact that the best work has to be done.
Github has the forks link for easy navigation to other spins. If core won't except contributions for whatever reason let the marketplace decide what is useful. Let a thousand flowers bloom I say.
* probably yak shaved and far too much for what I use it for
The disappearance of bikeshedding doesn't look like an obvious one but it's a huge loss. Imagine if every scientist resolved to refer to already written books and carry on their research in closed labs with no discussion with the rest of their field.