Open Source as We Know It Is Dead

I could not imagine the pain being being the head of a Libre/Open project nowadays.It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea. reply: > Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.Why not? It works for Dusk OS!

I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way. reply: Goodhart's Law. If community participation becomes a hard requirement we'll see AI agents swamp them too.

There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.

Well written & relatable.At first i thought it was going to be a pure counter-AI rant, but no, the author admits using AI everyday in a variety of ways.Another argument, maybe OSS of smaller packages is on its way out as we get to generate whatever is needed on the fly?

> It was the people. It was fixing a typo in a README and having someone say thanks. It was a stranger on the other side of the world finding a bug in my code and sending a fix before I'd even woken up.All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.

Yeah, the people aspect is dead or dying. I was having fun over the past few months, putting some AI assisted things I'd always wanted into the world.Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.

this could be siloed into complaints about github and pr workflows moreso than being related to FOSS. zero mention of mailing lists or patches, lol reply: Ahh yes, the fix is to regress to mailing lists...They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.

I personally find it better than ever, even with the current issues outlined in the post. We'll work through them, the linux kernel team has, the rest of us can too. But never has been easier to work on or hack up unfamiliar projects to learn from, build on, and extend. Many projects have more refined features with fewer bugs. It's not all bad stuff happening.

It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.