It _might_ kill open source. It might lower revenue opportunities according to this abstract. Bit of a click-bait paper title.
Vibe coding kills open source
71–80 of 304 posts
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#72Small 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 like this take. "How things are today + LLM" is in some ways the best we can approximate because one is all we know and other side is the future unfolding before our eyes.
One of the coolest things about vibe coding I find is starting with a base like django then using vibe coding to build models and templates exactly how one wants for a UIUX. Basically maybe we still need humans for the guts and low level stuff but that provides a base for fast, easy personalized customization.
I had a job where in short we had a lot of pain points with software that we had no resources permitted to fix them. With a mix past experience, googling I started writing some internal web based tools to fix these gaps. Everyone was happy. This is where I see vibe coding being really helpful in the higher level stuff like higher level scripting and web based tools. Just my opinion based on my experience.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#73On the contrary, I hope vibe coding revives Linux desktop into a truly usable platform. e.g. Vibe coding defeats GNOME developers' main argument for endlessly deleting features and degrading user experience - that features are ostensibly "hard to maintain". Well, LLMs are rapidly reducing development costs to 0. The bottleneck for UI development is now testing, and here desktop Linux has advantage - Linux users have…
Is the maintenance due to code or due to people / politics / etc? LLMs won't change that.
Also it's a formal system and process, "vibe" coding is anything but. Call me curmudgeony (?) but I don't think "vibe coding" should be a phrase used to describe LLM assisted software engineering in large / critical systems.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#74maybe we just need License-Aware Vibe Coding that can link back to code snippet provenance similar to SBOMs?
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#75Small 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 don't think apps where people spend a lot of time are equivalent to small tools. You can vibe code a calculator but you probably spend most of your time on much more complex software.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't trust software that has .claude in its GitHub repo.
You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up. I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews. Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring…
> I've been
so not now, then?
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think of the paper's research claims that the returns for maintainers are reduced and sharing is decreasing?
Without real finance model innovation, what returns?
I upvoted your comment.
Also, it's a scarcity mindset.
I don't agree that sibling to my comment: "make money by getting papers cited". it is not a long-term solution, much as Ad revenue is broken model for free software, also.
I'm hopeful that we see some vibe-coders get some products out that make money, and then pay to support the system they rely on for creating/maintaining their code.
Not sure what else to hope for, in terms of maintaining the public goods.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#78Small 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…
Then you’re going to be left behind. I’m going to be left behind.
Every problem or concern you raise will adapt to the next world because those things are valuable. These concerns are temporary, not permanent.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#79Does it seem to anyone else that author's have created a definition for 'vibe coding' that is specifically designed to justify their paper? Also that their premise is based on the assumption that developers will be irresponsible about the use of these tools ("often without users directly reading documentation, reporting bugs, or otherwise engaging with maintainers") so that it would actually be people killing open source not 'Vibe Coding'? Just a guess on my part, but once developers learn to use these tools and we get over the newness I think this will be great for open source. With these tools open source projects can compete with an army of corporate developers while alleviating some of the pressure on overworked under-rewarded maintainers.
Re: Vibe coding kills open source
#80For me spending time on my open source projects doesn't make sense anymore. People (the community and employers) previously were impressed because of the amount of work required. Now that respect is gone as people can't automatically tell on the surface if this is a low effort vibe code or something else. Community engagement has dropped. Stars aren't being given out as freely. People aren't actively reading your cod…
But effort / amount of work shouldn't be a deciding factor - I think anyone can churn out code if they choose to. But it's the type and quality of it.
Nobody cares if you wrote 5000 LOC, what they care about is what it does, how it does it, how fast and how good it does it, and none of those qualifiers are about volume.