You're way ahead of the folks here and they've made you pay for it.

Yeah, with AI you can just fork code, get a fix/feature added, and then have AI fold back in changes if you even care about them.

Maybe people didn't realize you meant that the collective effort of human maintainers is what's dying? As AI gets better it becomes even more trivial to drive a project. The idea of bike-shedding with other people or campaigning to get in some feature that's critical to you becomes pointless.

Just last month I forked libghostty to have AI implement some features I wanted for my personal terminal project, then last week I started getting AI to build me my own terminal engine in Swift.

It came up with its own smart architecture like splitting the execution plan vs render as pty feeds come in, and many other nice things I wouldn't have had the foresight to consider on day 1 had I started the project myself. Not to mention it would have taken me many months of time I don't have.

Granted, it's a week of daily work to get it to a point where I'd use it, and probably another week of polish to where I'd swap libghostty for it. Especially with my slower AI workflow that guarantees robust, well-designed code. But I've written no code, the writing is on the wall, and this is the worst AI will ever be.

This does anything but put the user in control. I also think that arbitrary new features on established platforms are not in any close future as it already burns many tokens for you to instruct your agent to fork something and add x, y, z.

>AI will become the repository owner

So Open Source transitions to Public Domain.