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The fate of "small" open source

nolanlawson.com

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Re: The fate of "small" open source

#11

Post by jazzypants »

RhythmFox wrote: post #6
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.

He also points out a pointless type check in a type checked language... Your name is very accurate I must say.

That type check is honestly not pointless at all. You can never be certain of your inputs in a web app. The likelihood of that parameter being something other than an arraybuffer is non-zero, and you generally want to have code coverage for that kind of undefined behavior. TypeScript doesn't complain without a reason.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#12

Post by NegativeK »

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 problem isn't that AI slop is doing something new. Phishing, blogspam, time wasting PRs, website scraping, etc have all existed before.

The problem is that AI makes all of that far, far easier.

Even using tooling to filter articles doesn't scale as slop grows to be a larger and larger percentage of content, and it means I'm going to have to consider prompt injections and running arbitrary code. All of this is a race to the bottom of suck.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#13

Post by dakiol »

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.

So far I've never seen yet a non-programmer release production-grade code using only LLMs. There's just so much to care about (from security, deployments, secret management, event-driven architectures, and a large etc.) that "just" providing a prompt to create an "app" doesn't cut it. You need infra and non-engineers just don't know shit about infra (even if it's 99% managed), you need to deploy your llm-generated code in that infra; that should happen in a ci/cd probably. And what about migrations? Git? Who's setting up the api gateway? I don't mean to say that LLMs don't know how to do that, but you need to instruct them to do so, and even there, they will make silly mistakes and you need to re-instruct them or fix it.

Prompting is just 50% of the work (and the easy part actually). Ask the Head of Product or whoever is there to deploy something valuable to production and maintain it for 6 months while not losing money. It's just not going to happen, not even with truly AGI.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#14

Post by mccoyb »

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 true value (or lack of value) of these tools can be established — the only place where one can test mettle against metal in a completely unconstrained way.

Did you ever want to build a compiler (or an equally complex artifact) but got stuck on various details? Try now. It’s going to stand up something half-baked, and as you refine it, you will learn those details — but you’ll also learn that you can productively use AI to reach past the limits of your knowledge, to make what’s beyond a little more palatable.

All the things people say about AI is true to some degree: my take is that some people are rolling the slots to win a CRUD app, and others are trying to use it to do things that they could only imagine before —- and open source tends to be the home of the latter group.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#15

Post by zkmon »

Open source exists because coding was a significant effort and code was a thing of high value. Unsurprisingly companies hesitated to make the code public and free. All of this is changing now as coding has suddenly become trivial. So, yes, the mission of open source, in general, will be challenged.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#16

Post by nowittyusername »

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…

True innovation will come from open source for sure. As the developers don't have the same economic incentives to be "safe", "ethical" "profitable" or whatever. large corporations know this and fear this development. That's why i expect a significant lobbying to take hold in USA that will try and make local AI systems illegal. And I think they will be very convincing to the government. Because the government also fears the "peasants" and giving them any true semblance of real AGI like systems. I bet very soon we will start seeing various classifications that will define what is legal and what is not for a citizen to possess or use.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#17

Post by levkk »

Several issues:

1. Reducing dependencies is a wrong success metric. You just end up doing more work yourself, except you can't be an expert in everything, so your code is often strictly worse.

2. Regenerating the same solutions with a probabilistic machine will produce bugs a certain percentage of the time. Dependencies are always the same code (when versioned).

3. Cognitive overhead for human review is higher with LLM-generated libs, for no additional benefit.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#18

Post by 59nadir »

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.

An LLM might be able to replace the majority of the code Sindre Sorhus has put out there, but it's probably a stretch to think that it could replace someone like John Carmack.

Trivial NPM libraries were never needed, but LLMs really are the nail in the coffin for them even when it comes to the most incompetent programmers because now they can literally just ask an LLM to spit out the exact same thing.

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#19

Post by AstroBen »

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 difference is that the cost of slop has decreased by orders of magnitude. What happens when only 1 in 10,000 of those tutorials you can find is any good, from someone actually qualified to write it?

Re: The fate of "small" open source

#20

Post by jcelerier »

levkk wrote: post #17

Several issues: 1. Reducing dependencies is a wrong success metric. You just end up doing more work yourself, except you can't be an expert in everything, so your code is often strictly worse. 2. Regenerating the same solutions with a probabilistic machine will produce bugs a certain percentage of the time. Dependencies are always the same code (when versioned). 3. Cognitive overhead for human review is higher with L…

> Reducing dependencies is a wrong success metric. You just end up doing more work yourself

Except it's just not true in many cases because of social systems we've built. If I want to ship software to Debian I have to make sure that every single of my 3rdparty dependencies is registered and packaged as a proper debian package - a lot of time it will take much less work to rewrite some code than to get 25 100-lines-of-code micro-libraries accepted into debian.

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