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Vibe coding kills open source

arxiv.org

161–170 of 304 posts

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#161

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

The vast majority of users make zero changes to the default settings of an app or device, even for software they use all the time and where some simple builtin adjustments would significantly improve their experience.

I simply can't imagine a world where these same people all decide they constantly want to learn a completely unique UX for whatever piece of software they want to use.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#162
Generative AI is a major setback to OSS licensing. I've been on projects where we needed to do a "cleanroom" implementation and vet the team has never viewed the source code of competing products. Now in the gen AI era, coding agents are IP laundering machines. They are trained on OSS code, but the nuances of the original licenses are lost.

On the whole, I think it is a net gain for civilization, but if we zoom into OSS licensing... not good.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#163

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

The more I experiment with quickly coding up little projects with LLMs the more I am convinced of this. There is that saying: 90% of your customers use 10% of your software's features, but they each use a different 10%. Well, the ability to quickly vibe up a small bespoke app that does that 10% AND NOTHING ELSE is here now, and it kind of solves that problem. We don't need to put up with DoEverythingBloatWare (even open source DoEverything) when you can just have the bits and pieces you actually want/need.

Also, you don't have to fear breaking updates--you know for sure that the software's UI will not just change out from under you because some designer had to pad their portfolio. Or that you're not going to lose a critical feature because the developer decided to refactor and leave it out.

I'm currently going through and looking at some of the bigger, bloated, crashing slow-moving software I use and working on replacements.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#164
post #48

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I think that's an optimistic interpretation of how good LLMs are? But I think the reality is: LLMs democratise access to coding. In a way this decreases the market for complete solutions, but massively increases the audience for building blocks.

> LLMs democratise access to coding

by making the world dependent on 3, fascist adjacent, US tech companies?

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#165
post #161

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

The vast majority of users make zero changes to the default settings of an app or device, even for software they use all the time and where some simple builtin adjustments would significantly improve their experience. I simply can't imagine a world where these same people all decide they constantly want to learn a completely unique UX for whatever piece of software they want to use.

All the people may not, but a decently skilled software engineer armed with an LLM, who doesn't have a lot of free time might be now be motivated to do it, whereas before it was like, "This thing is going to take months to replace, do I really want to write my own?"

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#166
post #162

Generative AI is a major setback to OSS licensing. I've been on projects where we needed to do a "cleanroom" implementation and vet the team has never viewed the source code of competing products. Now in the gen AI era, coding agents are IP laundering machines. They are trained on OSS code, but the nuances of the original licenses are lost. On the whole, I think it is a net gain for civilization, but if we zoom into…

It could be a net gain for civilization if it stayed open, decentralized and off the hands of private companies, but that's not at all the case. Only tecchies care or even know about open models

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#167

Something I've noticed is that AI code generation makes it easier/faster to generate code while shifting more work of the work of keeping code correct and maintainable to the code review stage. That can be highly problematic for open source projects that are typically already bottlenecked by maintainer review bandwidth. It can be mitigated by PR submitters doing a review and edit pass prior to submitting a PR. But a…

To me, an old guy, I would rather have LLM doing (assisting with) the code review than the actual code production. Is that stupid?

Take a look at CodeRabbit and Sourcery if you want to give that a go.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#168

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I can speak to this directly: I've customized a few extensions I use with VSCode, (nearly) completely having the AI generate/iterate over my feature request until it works. I don't have the time to learn the details (or different languages) of the various projects, but I get huge benefit from the improvements.

- PRO Deployer

- MS Typescript

- Typescript-Go

- a bespoke internal extension to automate a lot of housekeeping when developing against tickets (git checks, branch creation, stash when switching, automatically connecting and updating ticket system)

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#169
post #122
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up. I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews. Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring…

> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here" What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments. > "I don't get the sour opinions." The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they th…

> What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

I don't know what jobs have been impacted yet, but there will likely be pressure for all content creators and knowledge workers to use the tools to get more work done.

We'll probably start seeing this in software development this year. The tools finally feel ready for prime time.

> This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.

I am familiar with the most common arguments in opposition - stealing training data, hallucinations, not understanding logic (this is why "engineers in the loop" matters), big corps owning the tech (I really agree with this one), power usage, etc.

It feels as though the downvotes are from people that "dislike AI" for any of the aforementioned reasons. In the face of the possibility of losing jobs to engineers that leverage AI to get more quality work done, however, I don't know why HN engineers downvote anecdotes about real world usage. This is vital to know and understand. I would think one would want more evidence to consider about the state of things.

This is a quickly developing story. Your jobs are or will be on the line.

It doesn't matter what your personal misgivings are if your job will soon require the use of AI. You can hate it all you want, but if people are getting 10x more work done than you, you really don't have a choice.

This will be the same in every career sector with AI models that can be deployed to automate work -- marketing, editing, film, animation, VFX, software, music production, 3D modeling, game design, etc.

I don't think the jobs are going away, but I do think they're going to change. Fast.

No sense in sour grapes.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#170

I think LLMs also kill off most programming languages. I think we’ll end up with a handful of languages that LLMs most proficient at writing for and the languages required for device or processor compatibility. The cost improvement for an LLM to emit a feature (with an engineer in the loop) is too much of an improvement. We’ll look at engineers coding in C the same way we look at engineers today who code in assembly.…

I've done a bit of experimentation with that. And the irony is Rust seems to fare best because of the error messages of the compiler. I have had a lot of conversations with Claude about it and it supports that theory.

Warning: Claude may support the theory, because Claude is a sycophant.
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