alt Hacker NewsBut the users would have to maintain their own forks then. Unless you stream back patches into your forks, which implies there's some upstream being maintained. Software doesn't interoperate and maintain itself for free - somebody's gotta put in the time for that.
I think as long as AI isn't literal AGI, social pressures will keep projects alive, in some state. There definitely is something scary about stealing entire products as a mean for new market domination - e.g. steal linux then make a corporate linux, and force everybody to contribute to corporate linux only (many linux contributors are paid by corporations, after all), and make that the new central pointer. That might be worst case scenario - then Microsoft, in collusion (which I admit is far fetched, but def possible), could completely adopt linux for servers and headless compute, and enforce very strict hardware restrictions such that only Windows works.
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Agents can clearly strip out functionality from libraries already. They can certainly backport patches to whatever parts you strip out.
The advantage of decoupling from supply chain attacks is so large that I expect this to be standard practice as soon as later this year.
> But the users would have to maintain their own forks then.
I suppose the idea would be, they don't have to maintain it: if it ever starts to rot from whatever environmental changes, then they can just get the LLM to patch it, or at worst, generate it again from scratch.
(And personally, I prefer writing code so that it isn't coupled so tightly to the environment or other people's fast-moving libraries to begin with, since I don't want to poke at all of my projects every other year just to keep them functional.)