alt Hacker NewsOpen source has never been more alive for me. I have been publishing low key for years, and AI has expanded that capability more than 100 fold, in all directions. I had previously published packages in multiple languages but recently started to cut back to just one manually. But now with AI, I started to expand languages again. Instead of feeling constrained by toolchains I feel comfortable with, I feel freedom to publish more and more.
The benefits to publishing AI generated code as open source are immense including code hosting and CI/CD pipelines for build, test, lint, security scans, etc. In additional to CI/CD pipelines, my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc. All of this makes the code more reliable and maintainable, for both human and AI authored code.
Some thoughts on two recent posts:
1. 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521157): I'm generally too busy to publishing code to promote, but at some time it might settle down. Additionally, with how fast AI can generate and refactor code, it can take some time before the code is stable enough to promote.
2. So where are all the AI apps? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503006): They are in GitHub with <2 stars! They are there but without promotion it takes a while to get started in popularity. That being said, I'm starting to get some PRs.
Replies
So we'll have 100 2-star repositories per software developer containing stolen code and that is somehow a good thing?
It is completely delusional that these copied "works" will have any effect or be used by anyone but the most rabid AI proponents just to make a point.
>my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc.
Unless you're using an enterprise license that indemnifies your liabilities, you're almost certainly breaking copyright law and your packages are unusable by any serious company as a dependency. Even permissive OSS licenses like MIT don't take effect since they're predicated on the author actually holding a valid copyright (which you don't if AI agents have committed to your repo, as affirmed by USCO).
We'll almost certainly have a situation where if an open-source repo has direct AI agent commits in its history, it will be just as untouchable for companies as GPL repos.