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Devtools must be open source

blog.exe.dev

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Re: Devtools must be open source

#161

Post by crawshaw »

dismalaf wrote: post #85

Really? Software engineer and you just started making personalized tools recently? Emacs has been customizable probably longer than I've been alive. Apart from tinkering with Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ when I was a kid, the first things I made were Ruby scripts as personal tools for various things. Had a personalized Emacs environment 20 years ago. Iterated on some abandoned open source projects. And so on... I gue…

Hi, author here. The entire second paragraph of my blog post is dedicated to the question you asked. There is really nothing more I can add.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#162

Post by spullara »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…

I now have a fork of Ghostty that is kept up to date with AI and automatically triages and then PRs issues. All because I wanted to have a built in settings page instead of a config file I needed to edit. The future of software is custom per user.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#163

Post by katbyte »

mbreese wrote: post #109
fleventynine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution for this is to pay open source maintainers for their attention. If I want them to review and merge my bugfix I should attach $1000 to the PR.

This is actually not a bad idea for funding open source software. It used to be that you’d have an author who coded a project and then could fix the occasional bug or two quickly. Now, we have larger projects where it is rare for one people to have a complete understanding, and the main value is a person to reviewing patches and bugs to make sure the changes align with the larger goals/path for the project. There is…

Opportunity for gh

“Here is my pr I attach x$ payable when it is merged” and allow me to add $ to other prs.

I have been waiting year + for multiple feature in some projects that have open prs and for one I would easily bid 100-200$

Re: Devtools must be open source

#164

Post by crawshaw »

lilerjee wrote: post #93
2190asfg wrote: post #11

Company that resells openclaw and closed providers preaches about open source. The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week. Problem is, 99.99% of people (including developers) do not need "personalized" software, unless you mean Emacs style.

> The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week. I agree with you. They are manipulating public opinion, fooling users.

Hi, author here. FWIW, the only people I coordinated with are my colleagues at exe.dev. Philip wrote a blog post a week ago on the topic too: https://blog.exe.dev/customizing-shelley. In retrospect, I should have sent drafts of this to other people I know thinking about new dev tooling to get their feedback! A bit more private discussion could have let me polish this more.

We are all busy discovering the shape of new tools and norms as our profession has been overturned by LLMs. It is not too surprising similar ideas are floating about. Though I have not seen anything that captured how I now go about personalizing programs, and how I expect it to change our industry. So I wrote this.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#165

Post by HiPhish »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…

> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.

So it's like everything else in life. I am not a plumber, but I very much do want to be free to do my own plumbing if I want to. Not because I do want to, but because it means that I do get to choose whom I let do my plumbing.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#166

Post by zephen »

bonoboTP wrote: post #82
zephen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community. This is true, of course, but having a community is completely orthogonal to whether software is open or closed source.

The two are correlated which does encourage that mistaken view. Github culture generally blends these two, having an open issue tracker, pull requests etc. as well as the code right there, often with a free license. But you can very much allow bug reports and feature requests in public while developing proprietary software and you can also very much work on a project alone or with a small group without being open to…

Plenty of proprietary packages had robust communities well before anything like github existed.

In fact, github is arguably a poor substitute for a community. Look at how communities such as the ones around the linux kernel or cPython communicate. It sure as shit isn't through issues or pull requests. Or rather, perhaps, the limited technical communication that an issue tracker is good for is not a valid large community consensus building mechanism.

> The key definitional question is the license, not any of the cultural stuff.

For direct modification, certainly. For customization, maybe. For ignored issues like the parent to my original comment was bemoaning? Maybe LLMs are good enough that we are almost ready to say "Make me a custom version of Photoshop" and then it doesn't matter.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#168

Post by shevy-java »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…

LLMs enable some new things but they ultimate do not solve the underlying problem when a human lacks knowledge. I write a lot of software on my own, but I have little to no real experience in the inner workings of the linux kernel. I could invest more time, but time is a finite resource, so I invest it into various other things that seem more important to me right now.

LLMs simplified some things that used to be hard or impossible before, though. That is indeed true. They also amplified AI slop spam, which is annoying. Some humans use AI to reply to other humans; this always upsets me, because it means the other human is not only very lazy, but also does not understand why AI slop spamming other humans is like a vile personal attack. You here state (if one does that) that you are not interested in listening or communicating with that other person.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#169

Post by wredcoll »

pjmlp wrote: post #111
wredcoll wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a boringly reductive take. It's not like hackernews is some amazing bastion of like, optimism and culture and interesting conversation, but surely we can do better than this?

HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?

Is there some magical utopian profession where people want to pay for tooling? Like, I'm sure there are people/groups who spend more on tools, like say, all the plumbers and carpenters buying $600 dewalt drills or whatever, but I'm having trouble with the idea that they want to do that.

If programmers, on average, don't pay very much for tooling, the magic of capitalism tells me that's because the tools aren't worth very much.

Re: Devtools must be open source

#170

Post by J-Kuhn »

simonw wrote: post #3

One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often. I think LLMs have changed…

For me, Nix(OS) solved most of the problems:

* Getting a dev env with `nix-shell -E '(import {}).somePackage'` where I can edit the source and compile it with the various `runPhase` commands[1]. Yes, a bit cumbersome, but it works and it is the same for all packages.

* Integrating the resulting patch into the package manager using overrides[2]. Sure, applying the patch may break at some point, but I am more comfortable reviewing that by hand than rely on an agent that does it for me.

[1]: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nixpkgs/Create_and_debug_package... [2]: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Overlays#Adding_patches

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