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The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#21

Post by exasperaited »

mccoyb wrote: post #14

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse. That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the t…

> It’s posed to get significantly stronger

It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny.

Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they have to sit down and have a policy discussion about whether to accept AI submissions, which involves people reheating a lot of anecdotal claims about productivity.

Having learned a bit about how to write compilers I know enough to know that I can guarantee you that an AI cannot help you solve the difficult problems that compiler-building tools and existing libraries cannot solve.

It's the same as it is with any topic: the tools exist and they could be improved, but instead we have people shoehorning AI bollocks into everything.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#23

Post by Aperocky »

> the era of small, low-value libraries like blob-util is over.

Thankfully (not against blob-util specifically because I've never intentionally used it), I wouldn't completely blame llms either since languages like Go never had this dependency hell.

npm is a security nightmare not just because of npm the package manager, because the culture of the language rewards behavior such as "left-pad".

Instead of writing endless utilities for other project to re-use, write actual working things instead - that's where the value/fun is.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#24

Post by lanstin »

cactusfrog wrote: post #22

This author assumes that open sourcing a package only delivers value if is added as a dependency. Publicly sharing code with a permissive license is still useful and a radical idea.

Yeah if I find some (small) unmaintained code I need, I will just copy it (then add in my metrics and logging standards :)

It shouldn't be a radical idea, it is how science overall works.

Also, as per the educational side, I find in modern software ecosystem, I don't want to learn everything. Excellent new things or dominantly popular new things, sure, but there are a lot of branching paths of what to learn next, and having Claude code whip up a good enough solution is fine and lets me focus on less, more deeply.

(Note: I tried leaving this comment on the blog but my phone keyboard never opened despite a lot of clicking, and on mastodon but hit the length limit).

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#25

Post by micromacrofoot »

exasperaited wrote: post #21
mccoyb wrote: post #14

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse. That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the t…

> It’s posed to get significantly stronger It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny. Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they ha…

yeah we are getting lots of "I don't know how to do this and AI gave me this code that doesn't work, can you fix it" or "AI said it can do this" and the feature doesn't exist... some people will even argue and say "but AI said it doesn't take long, why won't you add it"

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#26

Post by PunchyHamster »

vanschelven wrote: post #8
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #3

He almost got it right. It's not just the fate of small open source. It's the fate of all programmers now. Why hire a programmer when an LLM costs less, works faster and makes less mistakes (OP compliments better error handling, read the article). Unless you are a product owner, you have paying clients that love you and your product and won't simply ditch it in favour of a new clone, you are really screwed.

"when an LLM costs less, works faster and makes less mistakes"... indeed, but it doesn't follow at all that it's the fate of all programmers _now_... at least in my experience none of these things are true ATM.

Well, at the very least it costs less than asking intern to look for a lib doing something particular and give some examples... still about as accurate as the intern tho.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#27

Post by ncruces »

Aperocky wrote: post #23

> the era of small, low-value libraries like blob-util is over. Thankfully (not against blob-util specifically because I've never intentionally used it), I wouldn't completely blame llms either since languages like Go never had this dependency hell. npm is a security nightmare not just because of npm the package manager, because the culture of the language rewards behavior such as "left-pad". Instead of writing endle…

But as Go puts it:

“A little copying is better than a little dependency.”

https://go-proverbs.github.io/

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#28

Post by positron26 »

cactusfrog wrote: post #22

This author assumes that open sourcing a package only delivers value if is added as a dependency. Publicly sharing code with a permissive license is still useful and a radical idea.

Yep. Even just sharing code with any license is valuable. Much I have learned from reading an implementation of code I have never run even once. Solutions to tough problems are an under-recognized form of generosity.

This is a point where the lack of alignment between the free beer crowd and those they depend on is all too clear. The free beer enthusiast cannot imagine benefiting from anything other than a finished work. They are concerned about the efficient use of scarce development bandwidth without consciousness of why it is scarce or that it is not theirs to direct. They view solutions without a hot package cache as a form of waste, oblivious to how such solutions expedite the development of all other tools they depend on, commercial or free.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#29

Post by skydhash »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #10
RyanHamilton wrote: post #2

Less incentive to write small libraries. Less incentive to write small tutorials on your own website. Unless you are a hacker or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. We are entering the era of cheap spam of everything with little incentive for quality. All this for the best case outcome of most people being made unemployed and rolling the dice on society reorganising to that reality.

> or a spammer where your incentives have probably increased. Slight pushback on this. The web has been spammed with subpar tutorials for ages now. The kind of medium "articles" that are nothing more than "getting started" steps + slop that got popular circa 2017-2019 is imo worse than the listy-boldy-emojy-filled articles that the LLMs come up with. So nothing gained, nothing lost imo. You still have to learn how to…

The thing is, what is the actual point of this approach? Is it for leaning? I strongly believe there’s no learning without inmersion and practice. Is it for automation? The whole idea of automation is to not think about the thing again unless there’s a catastrophic error, it’s not about babysitting a machine. Is it about judgment? Judgment is something you hone by experiencing stuff then deciding whether it’s bad or not. It’s not something you delegate lightly.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#30

Post by hnlmorg »

More likely, what we will see is the decline of low effort projects. The JavaScript/ Typescript ecosystem has been plagued with such packages. But that’s more anomalous to the JS community than it is a systemic problem with open source in general.

So if fewer people are including silly dependencies like isEven or leftPad, then I see that as a positive outcome.

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