Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thoughtworks.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 152 posts

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

#131

Post by kubanczyk »

henry_bone wrote: post #95
ColdStream wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I hope more people start to get behind the 'Perma computing' movement. https://permacomputing.net/ Even if you don't agree with the exact political stances of the authors, the broad goals are notable. I have said it for years now, perma-computing is the missing piece of the free software movement. There is no point in the software being complete free/open if you have hardware that is locked down. Maybe on…

From that link:- "With that said, permacomputing is an anti-capitalist political project. It is driven by several strands of anarchism, decoloniality, intersectional feminism, post-marxism, degrowth, ecologism." They are post-modernist, collectivist, marxist. I couldn't get behind that. That ideology is arguably the most destructive in human history.

Nothing in this list implies "post-modernist", and post-marxism does not imply "marxist".

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

#132

Post by selectodude »

vinceguidry wrote: post #85
selectodude wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice. Note: I can’t code. Not a line.

What do you need your tiny routers to do?

Not run all of ASUS's unstable garbage software.

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

#133

Post by selectodude »

smcnally wrote: post #88
selectodude wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice. Note: I can’t code. Not a line.

Does this work on early Velop mesh nodes, by chance?

Doubt it - Linksys encrypts their firmware. ASUS not only doesn't, but left everything in the binary that made it really easy for GPT-5.6 to crack it open and decompile everything in ghidra.

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

#134

Post by inigyou »

quantummagic wrote: post #97
inigyou wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an underrated point that providing LLM output to someone else is worthless because if they wanted it, they could put in the same input.

Forming the prompt is still a skill, tokens aren't free, and it all takes some time and attention, which also has a price. So someone else doing that for you isn't exactly worthless , if they do a good job of it.

If they do a good job of it it won't be identifiable as AI output.

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

#135

Post by selectodude »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #89
selectodude wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-5.6 just finished writing a shim for me in rust that sits between Broadcom’s bullshit kernel and a standard Linux user space to turn my mesh routers into standard computers. At some point I’m not sure what the difference is in practice. Note: I can’t code. Not a line.

That is amazing, I am surprised how the other replies to your comment just ignore that aspect pf it.

I thought it was cool too, though I understand AI use is a heated debate and I think people get their backs up that some dumb illiterate like me who can't code has ghidra on my laptop decompiling kernel headers. I get it, the deluge is coming for my job too.

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

#136

Post by willismichael »

yummybrainz wrote: post #128
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure which is worse, content written by AI or people complaining about content being written by AI.

Pretty sure it's the former!

No way, it's AI generated content complaining about AI generated content.

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

#137

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #130
bitbasher wrote: post #9

I recently read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. It was oddly sad to read. The enthusiasm and optimistic view of open source and the future of software and craftsmanship. Looking at it in 2026.. incredibly sad. Forget the bazaar. Back to the cathedral.

The fact that Eric Raymond has gone full fascist in the intervening years was absolutely not on my bingo card back in the late 90s, but it makes CatB even less relevant now. Of course, he would tell you otherwise. He would say that the victory of the bazaar over the cathedral has only been accelerated by AI; indeed, he doesn't write code anymore and uses LLMs to develop everything. The scary part is, he might be righ…

[deleted]

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

#138

Post by epihelix »

efitz wrote: post #121
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…

Nowadays reading HN comments I imagine what it was like watching a buggy whip manufacturers meeting around the time of Henry Ford. The world is changing and many previous assumptions are being exposed as not widely held. Most people in the world don’t care how software comes into existence or what the source code looks like, and never did. Just like most people never cared how most anything else was made. We are seei…

I didn't know that people used to make buggy whips for free and give them away?

The thing about FOSS that everyone keeps forgetting is that it sits outside the market economy.

We write FOSS code because we love doing it, and love giving it away. If nobody else uses my code, I don't care - I'll still write it and still release it. That's the way it's always been, and LLMs will not change this (quite the contrary - they make it easier to realise and maintain FOSS projects).

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

#139

Post by scratcheee »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #123
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’m not sure which is worse, content written by AI or people complaining about content being written by AI.

When it comes to fluff/slop/etc, worse can be measured by word count, so there’s your answer.

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

#140

Post by Bruises »

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…

I'm not sure if you just missed that the OP said "myth" because you seem to be in complete agreement with them.
Post reply on HN