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

How vibe coding is killing open source

hackaday.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 65 posts

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#31

Post by milowata »

Lerc wrote: post #26

I really don't like the narrative of 'X is killing Y', or 'Z is dead' Everything being treated as an existential threat. I'm also not particularly fond of the other extreme of toxic positivity where any problem is just a challenge and everybody is excited to take them on. Once seems to understate the level of agency people have and the other seems to overstate. The world is changing. Adapting does seem to be the rati…

I actually started writing a very similar essay, but the hyperbole got too out of hand – open source isn't dying anytime soon.

I do think that SDKs and utility-focused libraries are going to mostly go away, though, and that's less flashy but does have interesting implications imo.

https://meelo.substack.com/p/a-mild-take-on-coding-agents

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#32

Post by gingerlime »

OGEnthusiast wrote: post #14
arjie wrote: post #3

It does seem like it's harming open source in a few ways: * no longer any pressure to contribute upstream * no longer any need to use a library at all * Verbose PRs created with LLMs that are resume-padding * False issues created with LLM-detection by unsophisticated users Overall, we've lost the single meeting place of an open-source library that everyone meets at so we can create a better commons. That part is true…

It's also now a lot easier to fork an open source project and tweak the last 10% so it works exactly as you want.

Exactly. Whilst I can see the problem with vibe-coded "contribution" that lower the signal/noise ratio on big OSS project, it's also "liberating" in the sense that forking becomes much more viable now. If previously it took time to dive into a project to tweak it to your needs, it's now trivial.

So in many senses AI is democratising open-source.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#33

Post by observationist »

Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone.

Just because some things suck, for now, doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development is changing. It'll be harder to distinguish between a good faith, quality effort that meets all the expectations of quality control without sifting through more contributions.

Anonymous participation will decrease, communities will have to create a minimal hierarchy of curation, and the web of trust built up in these communities will have to become more pragmatic. The relationships and the tools already exist, it's just the shape of the culture that results in good FOSS that will have to update and adapt to the technology.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#34

Post by danlitt »

rpodraza wrote: post #21
no_wizard wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably 90%+ of npm packages could probably go I feel npm gets held to an unreasonable standard. The fact is tons of beginners across the world publish packages to it. Some projects publish lots of packages to it that only make sense for those projects but are public anyway then you have the bulwark pa lager that most orgs use. It is unfair to me that it’s always held as the “problematic registry”. When you have a…

I think you are completely oblivious to the problems plaguing the NPM ecosystem. When you start a typical frontend project using modern technology, you will introduce hundreds, if not thousands of small packages. These packages get new security holes daily, are often maintained by single people, are subject to being removed, to the supply chain attacks, download random crap from github, etc. Each of them should ideal…

If these packages get security holes daily, they probably cannot "just go" as the parent comment suggested (except in the case of a hostile takeover). If they have significant holes, then they must be significant code. Trivial code can just go, but doesn't have any significant quality issues either.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#35

Post by LaurensBER »

observationist wrote: post #33

Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone. Just because some things suck, for now , doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development i…

I concur, open-source will be more reputation based and no doubt, in the future, LLMs can also act as a quality gate.

I work a lot with quants (who can program but are more focused on making money than on clean-code) and Opus 4.5 and Kimi 2.5 are extremely good at giving them architecture guidance. They tend to overcomplicate some things but the result is usually miles better than what they produced without LLMs.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#36

Post by pocksuppet »

charcircuit wrote: post #19
AlexandrB wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's not the same is that the LLMs used to create the code are highly centralized and controlled. I suspect it's only a matter of time until the content industries start trying to restrict what code LLMs are allowed to produce so that you can't use an LLM to bypass DRM.

There are competent open source LLMs out today. They are not highly centralized.

There's one at the top of Hacker News right now, Qwen3-Coder-Next: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46872706

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#37

Post by blibble »

LaurensBER wrote: post #35
observationist wrote: post #33

Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone. Just because some things suck, for now , doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development i…

I concur, open-source will be more reputation based and no doubt, in the future, LLMs can also act as a quality gate. I work a lot with quants (who can program but are more focused on making money than on clean-code) and Opus 4.5 and Kimi 2.5 are extremely good at giving them architecture guidance. They tend to overcomplicate some things but the result is usually miles better than what they produced without LLMs.

as we're doing anecdotes: I work with quants too

their LLM "assisted" work seems to be the roughly the same quality (i.e. bad), but now there's much more of it

not an improvement

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#38

Post by tobyjsullivan »

observationist wrote: post #33

Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone. Just because some things suck, for now , doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development i…

Further to this, the quality problem is affecting the entire industry, not just FOSS. Anyone working on a large enough team has already seen some contributors pushing slop.

And while banning AI outright is certainly an option at a private company, it also feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water. So we’re all searching for a solution together, I think.

There was a time (decades ago) when projects didn’t need to use pull requests. As the pool of contributors grew, new tools were discovered and applied and made FOSS (and private dev) a better experience overall. This feels like a similar situation.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#39

Post by AtlasBarfed »

I understand that there's a lot of open source projects that are massive collaborations.

There are also a lot of open source projects that are simply one-man shows. And llm should be massively helping those and I really don't see that so far.

I would say they should be a massive gain to the open source community cuz let's face it. The people that do open source are simply going to be different than the people that just feed on it.

Llm should be a massive enabler to open source. It should permit easy porting between architectures, programming languages and interfaces to a degree that simply wasn't possible before

Again, I'm not really seeing that.

Re: How vibe coding is killing open source

#40

Post by tayo42 »

observationist wrote: post #33

Things change. The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created, more people will participate in communal efforts, and quality will depend on AI capabilities and figuring out how to curate well - better tools, less friction between idea and reality, and things get better for everyone. Just because some things suck, for now , doesn't mean open source is being killed. It means software development i…

As I think about it, I think lowering the barrier to entry does generally ruin things

The internet is worse off.

The sports I participate in got cheaper to start with and are worse. Cultures worse.

What has gotten better because the barrier to entry is lower?

Post reply on HN