alt Hacker NewsThe zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era.
Here's my thoughts on this. It's back to open source, not open maintainer or open usage. I am producing lots of new code, i am publishing it. I am NOT interested in starting a project or having other people contribute. It's a cambrian explosion, the cost of adding features is basically zero. I'm going with "patching software is more common and we need tools around patching" rather than using other peoples stuff, just take what you want and fix it.
One stupid one is XRDP required some hack to go through VNC to connect to an existing session. I now have it built into xrdp and lets you pick the X11 session you on dial up and you're good to go. Why is this not a feature I dont know, but xrdp does it all now without vnc or anything. good stuff. i published it sure, i dont care if anyone uses it though.
> the cost of adding features is basically zero
Adding features was always the easy part. Maintaining the code OTOH is not going to be easier.
I see this with an experimental project I’m consciously vibecoding. The code base tends towards a spaghetti coded mess.
Of course you can put in some refactoring prompts and the AI will reorganize the code. But that makes it worse actually.
You have no mental model of the code and after a large refactoring even less.