alt Hacker NewsI think this article is making a pretty big assumption: that people making things with AI are also going to be publishing them. And that's just the opposite of what should be expected, for the general case.
Like I've been making things, and making changes to things, but I haven't published any of that because, well they're pretty specific to my needs. There are also things which I won't consider publishing for now, even if generally useful because, well the moat has moved from execution effort to ideas, and we all want to maintain some kind of moat to boost our market value (while there's still one). Everyone has reasonable access to the same capabilities now, so everyone can reasonably make what they need according to their exact specs easily, quickly and cheaply.
So while there are many things being made with AI, there is ever-decreasing reasons to publish most of it. We're in an era of highly personalized software, which just isn't worth generalizing and sharing as the effort is now greater than creating from scratch or modifying something already close enough.
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Agree. There's also a weird ideological thing in open source right now, where any AI must be AI slop, and no AI is the only solution. That has strongly disincentivized legitimate contributions from people. I have to imagine that's having an impact.
There's a very real problem of low effort AI slop, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not the solution.
That said, I do kind of wonder if the old model of open source just isn't very good in the AI era. Maybe when AI gets a lot better, but for now it does take real human effort to review and test. If contributors were reviewing and testing like they should be doing, it wouldn't be an issue, but far too many people just run AI and don't even look at it before sending the PR. It's not the maintainers job to do all the review and test of a low-effort push. That's not fair to them, and even discarding that it's a terrible model for software that you share with anyone else.
> I think this article is making a pretty big assumption: that people making things with AI are also going to be publishing them. And that's just the opposite of what should be expected, for the general case.
The premise is that AI has already fundamentally changed the nature of software engineering. Not some specific, personal use case, but that everything has changed and that if you're not embracing these tools, you'll perish. In light of this, I don't think your rebuttal works. We should be seeing evidence of meaningful AI contributions all over the place.