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The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

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Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#41

Post by sshine »

overgard wrote: post #34

I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing…

> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!)

That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth.

Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in.

Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. The maintainer economy was already not working out, AI amplified the asymmetry at play.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#42

Post by asdff »

pixl97 wrote: post #32
asdff wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes non ai writers are drinking from the well of slop. Not all of course. Some people still read old books.

Old books don't tell you much about now in a great number of topics. >Gell-Mann Amnesia effect We're very familiar with this effect when it comes to the news, but since a lot of people are now looking at older information as some kind of escape it seems prudent to point out that old books themselves are of varying quality. Moreso, how do you track said quality of old books in the modern age where their will be incent…

Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#43

Post by krupan »

"One participant at the retreat noted that permissive licensing was a profound collective mistake, serving as a legal mechanism that enabled the world’s largest corporations to cannibalize volunteer labor..."

Agreed. Linux and GNU did and still do so well because of the GPL. Red Hat built a billion dollar business on GPL software. Tons of Linux developers are payed great salaries by competing corporations that otherwise collaborate on Linux, because none of them are allowed by the GPL to make proprietary changes to the code

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#44

Post by krupan »

sshine wrote: post #41
overgard wrote: post #34

I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing…

> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth. Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in. Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. Th…

I think you are correct on how it's playing out because AI cannot write software very well all on its own. The dream is that AI is so good that it can write all the code you need from scratch, replacing all and any code written by anyone else, but that's not happening

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#45

Post by pixl97 »

asdff wrote: post #42
pixl97 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old books don't tell you much about now in a great number of topics. >Gell-Mann Amnesia effect We're very familiar with this effect when it comes to the news, but since a lot of people are now looking at older information as some kind of escape it seems prudent to point out that old books themselves are of varying quality. Moreso, how do you track said quality of old books in the modern age where their will be incent…

Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.

You might underestimate the amount of pulp paperbacks that have been printed over the years. Quite often these are just a single step above AI slop.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#46

Post by asdff »

pixl97 wrote: post #45
asdff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reference material is one thing. But literature is pretty timeless. And there are used bookstores and public libraries.

You might underestimate the amount of pulp paperbacks that have been printed over the years. Quite often these are just a single step above AI slop.

Sure, and it infests the little free 'libraries' you see scattered around the neighborhood and often the shelves in the Goodwill, but a good used bookstore and a good public library system will do a bit of filtering on that. These places aren't firehoses.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#47

Post by arjie »

jeremyjh wrote: post #38
arjie wrote: post #35

The promise of free software was that you, as a user, were not constrained by the software someone else wrote. You could modify it to see fit. Today, I can replicate most software that way. So the promise is more realized than before. The actual code is useful, yes, because it means I don't have to have it written but if it didn't exist I'd still get there. The copyright and IP maximalism approaches aren't important…

The software you have generated for your personal use is a micro fraction of all the software that it uses directly and indirectly to fulfill your needs. The rest is OSS maintained by someone at no cost to you.

The rest is not OSS. Some of it is. Lots of it is proprietary software too and maintained at no cost to me. I can't imagine how much network switching software my stuff goes through. Didn't pay anything for that.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#48

Post by overgard »

sshine wrote: post #41
overgard wrote: post #34

I feel like the AI labs have an embrace-extend-extinguish model here like Microsoft of the 90s. Train your models on all the open source code, then extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) Like, personally I think the reason why AI works as well as it does for typescript is because it's essentially gluing…

> extinguish the ecosystem since open source libraries are essentially a competitor. (If there were no libraries you'd have to ask the AI to do everything!) That is neither the incentive of AI companies nor the truth. Availability of Open Source where stealing and illegal relicensing is not being litigated, is a perfect ecosystem for AI to work in. Maintainer exhaustion is totally a secondary effect, not intended. Th…

As far as I can tell, Anthropic's entire goal is to extinguish software development as a profession. They're not exactly subtle. If they do that, I don't see how they wouldn't take out open source with it as a consequence. If nobody even looks at code why would anyone bother to publish a library, much less care about making it maintainable? Shit, if everybody is vibe coding how long before your "average" dev has no idea what a library even is or why you'd want one?

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#49

Post by jeremyjh »

richardjennings wrote: post #28

This goes one of two ways. Either the LLM public capability is not sufficient to positively contribute, or it is. If it is not sufficient to positively contribute, open source projects become drowned in low quality contributions. If it is sufficient to positively contribute, we end up with multiple implementations of open source projects. Actually maybe it only goes one way.

Personally I’ve been forking a lot more OSS and modifying it for my own use with little regard to contributing back because I haven’t read any of it myself and am not going to make public claims about it. It used to be I’d spend hours or days fixing a bug or adding a feature and getting it merged upstream seemed to help validate that effort. Now there is no effort so no need for validation and I continue on my way.

The commits are in my fork if anyone wants them but I can’t imagine why anyone would.

On the other hand a couple weeks ago I found an annoying bug in a coding agent project and had my agent fix it. It was a very small fix so I could tell it was correct with very little effort. I didn’t open a PR because that required a vouch, but I documented an issue (mostly on my own) and included the patch. I also referenced it in a downstream issue. Then I went to bed. The next morning, I saw a note from downstream thanking me - they’d updated to latest version and the issue was fixed.

The projects bot had reproduced the issue based on my description, tested the fix, validated it, and opened a PR. The maintainer merged it an hour later (it was two lines and obviously correct - easy call with the bots validation) and released it.

It felt like progress.

Re: The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

#50

Post by linsomniac »

zcw100 wrote: post #20

People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time and saying silly things like "every line of code was reviewed by a human". First, it's ridiculous. There is no possible way to verify that claim, determine what was or wasn't done after reviewing it, and there's no reason to review every single line. It's performative. I have a ton of stuff I haven't bothered contributing. Why? So I can deal with all the hate? When it…

>People need to stop yelling "Slop!" all the time

People are applying that label to anything that has the taint of AI on it. I get why.

I realize there are a lot of reasons why people hate AI, but one that is frequently cited is that it's dehumanizing. It's kind of ridiculous to see those same sort of people call something "slop" when I've put tens of hours into guiding the AI tooling. Talk about dehumanizing!

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