alt Hacker NewsLLMs stop me using open source libraries for two reasons
(1) GitHub is now full of slop. The majority of new open source libraries are now generated by AI. Many come from students who are just looking for resume garnish. Others come from devs who are more excited about being an "open source developer" than actually doing open source development
(2) With AI I can probably build something better. And if it's crap? No problem! I can just wait 6 months and rewrite it with gpt_galaxy or Claude Torah or something
At the same time I have no real incentives to contribute back. Anything I create competes immediately with a sea of slop. Any actual work I do gets identified and swallowed up by the plagiarism machine. And to be honest I only occasionally had good experiences with OSS anyway
I think we are looking at the end of open source software. Not the end of free software - in fact that may end up flourishing with LLMs and reverse engineering and the like. But the idea of programmers sharing code, for communal interest and career building, is completely dead.
Replies
>Not the end of free software - in fact that may end up flourishing with LLMs and reverse engineering and the like.
LLMs are antithetical to free software, which everyone seems to forget is as much an ethical and social movement as it is a classification of software licensing, and will be until one can examine and audit the training data of a model to exclude the possibility of including any non-free code, and until they include, document and respect the licenses for the sources they do use.
The degree to which they discourage people from actually being able to understand and modify code without an LLM also makes the code they generate implicitly nonfree. All of the freedoms of free software presuppose their utility to a human over their utility to a machine. If people aren't reading, writing and distributing code then it defeats the entire point. That's just proprietary software with extra steps.
I don't know what you call this new paradigm of vibe-coding and just not giving a damn about sources and licenses and copyright, but it isn't free software. And it's probably worth pointing out that said paradigm was created by and is most useful to corporations, not people. Using the plagiarism machine to plagiarize "the man" is still subject to the Rule of Goats[0].
[0]https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Popehat%27s+...
When they have Claude Upanishads and GPT Dodecahedron we'll know the singularity is near
How about (3): that in-house utility that you want to re-use across projects because it scratches one itch in precisely the way you want it scratched. Its raison d'être does not disappear from the appearance of LLM, it arguably gets stronger. You want the decisions that went into the library to be encoded in immutable form from the perspective of the contexts working on library dependents.
In the old days, both the investment in the library and the additional cost you'd want to sink on it to consider it publishing quality incentivised to keep it truly internal. LLM code however? It might be slop, but it's accurately groomed slop. Prompting the model to roleplay a public library author might even improve the output when it's in fact not published at all. The investment is low, the extra cost of sharing is low, worst that could happen is others actually picking it up and that would not be bad at all.
Is that spamming the public information universe on the faint hope that perhaps future models might come pre-trained with understanding of your library? Sure. But it's a very different thing from the scenarios described in (1).