alt Hacker NewsFrom Chesterton's fence to Chesterton's gap
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Related to this, the concept of "Free as in Puppies" from Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, quote:
"""
Suppose you had a pull request for SQL. Hey. I've got this new feature for SQLite. Here's the pull request. When you're wanting me to pull that into the tree, you say, oh, it's free.
No. It's not free. What you're doing is asking me that "I have this this cool feature", and you want me to maintain it for you, to to document it for you, to test it for you, to maintain it for you for the next twenty five years.
That's not free.
You know, Linus Torvalds is famous for saying, you know, there's free as in beer and free as in speech. Mhmm. But there's another kind of freedom. Free as in as in puppies.
Oh, look. I've got a free puppy for you. Okay? You see where this is going?
A pull request is a free puppy. And then you just got a kennel at the end of the day full of puppies. You're just like Yeah. And and you can't just throw them out.
Okay? You're morally obligated to take care of them for natural life. Yep. I know. I don't want any free puppies.
"""
The counterpoint is that building software is not building a fence. When you create something in software, nothing tangible changes until that's accepted and running on all the places that you deploy to. A PR is just a hey, here's a fence that the contributor built elsewhere that proves that building something like this is possible.
The corollary is design your open source libraries so they're obvious enough that the chesterton's gaps are obvious. Anytime an AI tool submits something that breaks your expectation of things not being necessary it usually highlights that there's a missing gap in the explanation of what is necessary.