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

thoughtworks.com

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

#111

Post by jasonkester »

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI.

Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?"

So I ask the Author: Please write this article for us using your own words, taking your own time to convey your thoughts. Submit it and let us read it.

I bet it will be better than this.

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

#112

Post by theturtletalks »

SeoFood wrote: post #66
Cider9986 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenCode SuperCMD Zed Typewhisper

<3

TypeWhisper looks really nice man, great work. I’ll add it to my directory and sorry HN marked it dead. I also post open-source projects and HN marks it dead as well. Feel like the system is broken or people just flag anything they don’t like.

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

#113

Post by mikkolaakkonen »

jasonkester wrote: post #111

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI. Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?" So I a…

I totally agree, would love to read this "properly" !

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

#114

Post by pmontra »

socalgal2 wrote: post #96

> For years, the software engineering industry has operated on a comfortable, perhaps lazy, myth: that open source software is an infinite, self-renewing public good that costs nothing to consume and requires nothing to sustain. This is provably false and wish that sentiment would die Microsoft spends at least $600-$800 million on open source The make VS Code, .NET/C#, Edge, TypeScript. They provide free hosting, fre…

All of those companies have very compelling reasons to provide those tools for free, as in (most importantly dor adoption) no money asked and (less importantly) open source. They make money because of the number of people using those tools. They are a bridge head into controlling their own share of the market.

So: investment, not good will.

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

#115

Post by watwut »

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…

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

They literally sell themselves to investors as the thing that will destroy everything people create. That is their bragging point. And they are using things people created to destroy them and their future work.

Those are their openly stated goals. Which they claimed to achieve 2 years ago.

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

#116

Post by rixed »

zzzeek wrote: post #23

the issue with articles that try to analyze the state of open source and its sustainability and all that is that nothing about open source makes any sense if you just talk about it. Imagine you're transported to 1977 and you work at IBM and you try to tell them, oh hey I have an idea, how about the OS everyone uses for literally all commerce, communication, military, etc., you name it, will be written by one guy in h…

How do you prove a system is chaotic in sociology? Without such a proof, isn't it natural to try to explain in retrospect even the systems you failed to predict?

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

#118

Post by zeroimpl »

lstodd wrote: post #90
folkrav wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My latest feature was an overarching change across 4 different stacks, about a full work day of going back and forth iterating on different designs, generating workarounds for stack/language specific quirks and the business' usage patterns. Multiple fresh agent sessions, review passes, exploratory work with subagents, etc. "The prompt(s) that generated the change" in that context is multiple hours of discussion, Q&A,…

Yes. The value is in how you came to the design you expressed.

Wouldn’t the same argument apply even if they didn’t use AI? Being able to drill into coworkers minds would be nice on many occasions.

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

#119

Post by a-french-anon »

jasonkester wrote: post #111

I had to flag this article for violating HN's policy against submitting things written by AI. Which is a shame, because the premise is intriguing. But it's pretty rude to expect every one of us to sift through ten pages of AI tells to reverse engineer the prompts that hold the information the author wanted to convey. As the saying goes, "if you couldn't be bothered to write it, why should I bother to read it?" So I a…

Even more outrageous: there are two authors listed.

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

#120

Post by Cider9986 »

theturtletalks wrote: post #112
SeoFood wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

<3

TypeWhisper looks really nice man, great work. I’ll add it to my directory and sorry HN marked it dead. I also post open-source projects and HN marks it dead as well. Feel like the system is broken or people just flag anything they don’t like.

It was a new account with 0 interaction, it was not manually flagged. Only the second time with a GitHub link was it killed.

The system is trying its best with all the AI slop. People can email the site admins if their posts are getting unjustly killed.

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