>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+...