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Comment by observationist | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

One issue I found is that for new projects, it is much harder to market now. shownew is flooded and subreddits have turned up their spam filters high so quality projects will have trouble getting eyes without significant social activity before wanting to share. So the bar for introverts writing (not vibing) good OSS feels like it has gone up in an unfortunate way.

The barrier to entry decreased, meaning more things will get created

57 Channels and Nothin' On

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/57_Channels_(And_Nothin%27_On)

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?

Of course this is true but seems to be one of the most underrated facts of modern society. Always it is proposed without question to expand access to things, to "democratize" them, open barriers, open borders. But this invariably lowers quality while crowding out those already enjoying them. Think of any quality club, park, vacation spot, restaurant, online forum whatever: none of these are improved for your own usage of the thing by adding more people to it at least beyond some threshold. A lot of this is zero sum, and quality is in tension with quantity.

> more people will participate in communal efforts

AI won't teach collaboration.

Open source is a lot more about learning the norms of working together than the actual underlying software.

I think you have it backwards. Barrier to entry just went up, why would I use a library when I can ask LLM to make one for me.

It shifts in a way where „left-pad” kind of thing will not happen because no one will need that kind of „library” because LLM will generate it.

I see it as a positive thing, no single schmuck will be terrorizing whole ecosystem when there will be dozens of of different LLMs that can write such code.

More people with shut in because they will be able to create something commercial or their „thing” won’t matter because LLM will be able to replicate their effort in 5 minutes so no one will be willing to pay for that.

The main benefit of a library has always been standardization, not reducing effort.

I don't know how many times it's been said, but writing the code was never the hard part.

People who depend on LLMs are making the same old naive mistake that's been around for decades.

It's actually worse than in the past! At least the stubborn people who would insist on writing everything themselves had to comprehend their own code and were projecting overconfidence to mask their attempts at learning. We would turn a blind eye to junior devs doing this, but then reject it in code review and tell them to just use the correct library. Now we still have all that arrogance, but without any of the effort to learn jack shit.

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.

Projects back then did not use pull requests because that is a concept created by GitHub.

Apologies, I forgot to use the more general term.

FOSS projects didn’t always have a standard process for Fagan inspections.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fagan_inspection

the original pull request was an email to the upstream developer to run "git pull your-repo your-branch".

the concept is at least as old as git itself, possibly even older. github just created a webinterface for it.

I think it could be a good thing. The politics sucking the air out of projects and the entitled attitude from people that want something for free NOW was getting tiresome.

Raising barriers against AI slop will also create a good reason to ignore demanding non-AI slop as well. It might give the real contributors to open source projects some breathing space.

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