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Vibe coding kills open source

arxiv.org

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Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#181

Post by tracker1 »

I reject the assertion that AI Vibe Coding has to have any affect on how OSS maintainers get paid (or not). Most of those that are paid, are paid because their job is related but the OSS library/project itself is not directly monetized. I don't see AI/Vibe coding changing this... except that now the maintainer can choose or not to accept or use those tools on their project or not.

But the assertion that everything needs to change is absurd. Articles like this are similar in my mind to arguments for communism because every artist deserves a living wage... that's just not how society can sustain itself in reality. Maybe in a world without scarcity, but I don't see scarcity going away any time soon.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#182

Post by dns_snek »

fragmede wrote: post #129
kibwen wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed-source models aren't "democratizing" access to anything. If you wanted to hire a contractor to write some code for you, that's always been possible.

Part of democracy is that it's available to all citizens, and not just for the rich. Yes, it's always been possible to find someone , but not for $200/month that will work tirelessly wherever you want them to. 9:00 am Monday? great. 7pm Tuesday? Also great. 4 am on Sunday? Just as great, for an LLM.

How long will this heavily subsidized price of $200/month last? Do you really think these companies are going to let you pocket all the surplus value forever?

We all know that the music is going to stop eventually and that the landscape after that is going to look very different. Subsidies will stop and investors will want their trillions in returns. Talking about "democratization" while everyone is just using other people's money is completely premature.

Airbnb "democratized travel" for a while and now they're more expensive than their predecessors.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#183

Post by pmarreck »

natebc wrote: post #120
pmarreck wrote: post #115

Related but not sure how much attention it's getting: GPL is a dead man walking since you can have any LLM cleanroom a new implementation in a new language from a public spec with verifiable "never looked at the original source" and it can be more permissively-licensed however you wish (MIT, BSD etc). case in point, check out my current deps on the project I'm currently working on with LLM assist: https://github.com/…

Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights? I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.

Copyright has never required the absence of tools, only the presence of human creative agency.

LLMs don’t change that. They’re just tools. The relevant question is whether a human exercised creative judgment in selecting, shaping, or editing the output. Which I most certainly did. Otherwise my month of work here would have just been a minute and a single prompt and then just grabbing a coffee.

We already handle this with cameras, compilers, spell-checkers, and procedural generation. If you push a button and accept whatever falls out, you may not have authorship. If you meaningfully direct and curate the result, you almost certainly do.

Responsibility still lands on the human, which is a good sanity check: there is no such thing as “LLM-authored but human-unaccountable” work. Pretending otherwise is just outsourcing epistemic responsibility to a stochastic tool. Similarly, you can't both assign blame to me when things go wrong, but credit to the LLM when things go right. Or vice versa.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#184

Post by tracker1 »

anticorporate wrote: post #66
WarmWash wrote: post #29

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I think you're missing the enormous value in apps being standardized and opinionated. Standardized means that in addition to documentation, the whole internet is available to help you. Opinionated means as a user of an app in a new domain, you don't have to make a million decisions about how something should work to just get started. Sure, there will be more personalized apps for those who have a lot of expertise in…

I've seen plenty of "standardized" (ie, "Enterprise" applications)... I'd just assume a bespoke hammer that's simple and easy to understand over a complex beast of HammerFactoryFactory to deliver you a builder of custom hammer builders so you get the JobHammer you need as part of the IoC loader platform that is then controlled through a 1.2gb service orchestrator that breaks at 11am every third Tuesday for an hour. When all you need to do is post up a "Help Wanted" poster on a piece of wood.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#185

Post by digiown »

anticorporate wrote: post #66
WarmWash wrote: post #29

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I think you're missing the enormous value in apps being standardized and opinionated. Standardized means that in addition to documentation, the whole internet is available to help you. Opinionated means as a user of an app in a new domain, you don't have to make a million decisions about how something should work to just get started. Sure, there will be more personalized apps for those who have a lot of expertise in…

The apps/use cases for which such standardized and opinions tools can exist for, economically, mostly already exist IMO. Vibe coded tools fill an enormous space of semi-unique problems that only affect a small amount of people. For example various scripts to automate tasks imposed by a boss. The best balance is probably to use LLMs to use the standardized tools for you when available, so that things remain mostly scrutable.

As the saying goes, 80% of users only use 20% of the features of your program, but they are different 20% parts. When the user vibecode the program instead, only their specific 20% needs to be implemented.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#186

Post by sanskritical »

Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is still freely available, forever.

Vibe coding eventually creates more value for FOSS, not less.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#187

Post by vel0city »

blibble wrote: post #164
draxil wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's an optimistic interpretation of how good LLMs are? But I think the reality is: LLMs democratise access to coding. In a way this decreases the market for complete solutions, but massively increases the audience for building blocks.

> LLMs democratise access to coding by making the world dependent on 3, fascist adjacent, US tech companies?

I didn't know Mistral, Z.ai, Qwen, and Deepseek were all fascist adjacent US tech companies.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#188

Post by seniorThrowaway »

anticorporate wrote: post #66
WarmWash wrote: post #29

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I think you're missing the enormous value in apps being standardized and opinionated. Standardized means that in addition to documentation, the whole internet is available to help you. Opinionated means as a user of an app in a new domain, you don't have to make a million decisions about how something should work to just get started. Sure, there will be more personalized apps for those who have a lot of expertise in…

AI's / LLM's have already been trained on best practices for most domains. I've recently faced this decision and I went the LLM custom app path, because the software I needed was a simple internal business type app. There is open source and COTS software packages available for this kind of thing, but they tend to be massive suites trying to solve a bunch of things I don't need and also a minefield of licensing, freemium feature gating, and subject to future abandonment or rug pulls into much higher costs. Something that has happened many times. Long story short, I decided it was less work to build the exact tool I need to solve my "right now" problem, architected for future additions. I do think this is the future.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#189

Post by njhnjhnjhnjh »

reactordev wrote: post #45
WarmWash wrote: post #29

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

Why need a tool at all when the LLM can just build the house? What is a hammer? What is a keyboard? What’s a “Drivers License”?

[dead]

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#190

Post by reustle »

sanskritical wrote: post #186

Open source software, by the admission of this article, is a critical input to AI agents useful for code generation. So the way I see it is that there is now an entire industry that is incentivized to financially support open source software for entirely new reasons. To keep the models trained on new languages, libraries, and developments in computer science, they need to make sure that high quality modern code is st…

There is a reasonable argument that there won’t be many new languages now that models are sufficiently trained. If anything, we may see languages optimized for models and not humans.
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