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overgardtoday at 7:49 PM1 replyview on HN

I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing together a lot of open source code written by humans. The interesting functionality is mostly in those libraries. A developer that doesn't want to use AI can still be pretty productive within that context, but if the ecosystem is absolutely decimated..


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sshinetoday at 8:04 PM

> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!)

That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth.

Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in.

Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. The maintainer economy was already not working out, AI amplified the asymmetry at play.

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