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julianlamyesterday at 5:25 PM4 repliesview on HN

Respectfully, as an OSS maintainer (not to the scale of nginx or valkey, of course)... if a third-party used an AI agent to rewrite my software in a different language, that gives me absolutely no reason to support that new project.

It is in all respects foreign code in a language I may or may not be familiar with, and worse yet, if I were to take over, I'd be responsible for maintaining the whole black box forever more?

Thank you but no thanks.


Replies

baqyesterday at 5:32 PM

I don’t think anyone expects you to TBH. If you show interest, great. If not, the robot will translate your work into a different form of expression anyway. If you’re releasing open source software under BSD-like licenses, it’s still better than some company taking your work and selling it with zero value contributed back.

show 1 reply
mswphdyesterday at 8:48 PM

seems like it could be a decent opportunity for a bad actor to slip in something nefarious as well. We all know that nobody is reviewing a >>500k loc diff. For something like the Bun rewrite, where plausibly the person driving the agent(s) didn't want to sneak in something nefarious things might be ok. That seems significantly less true when you cannot trust the person driving the agent(s)/producing the >>500k loc diff.

ianm218yesterday at 5:33 PM

Yes I hope this can be separated from people who are inundating OSS maintainers with slop PRs - these are fully separate projects with zero expectation of involvement from maintainers. Valkey itself is forked off the original Redis.

There might be a world where people soon just find unsafe C code exposed to the web (i.e. nginx) an untenable situation and I hope it can be a helpful resource.

Anyway, I see open source code as positive sum. Maybe in the end only a small community who cares about cross compilation finds this helpful and thats a win!

dyauspitryesterday at 5:32 PM

Why would you have to take it over? Wouldn’t it just be a fork/different project entirely.