Sure, people did it for the fun and the credits, but the fun quickly goes out of it when the credits go to the IP laundromat and the fun is had by the people ripping off your code. Why would anybody contribute their works for free in an environment like that?
Technical ability is an absolute requirement for the production of quality work. If the signal drowns in the noise then we are much worse off than where we started.
Even then, I am not sure that changes the argument. If Linus Torvalds had access to LLMs back then, why would that discourage him from building Linux? And we now have the capability of building something like Linux with fewer man-hours, which again speaks in favor of more open source projects.
If AI is powerful enough to flood open source projects with low quality code, it will be powerful enough to be used as gatekeeper. Major players who benefit from OSS, says Google, will make sure of that. We don’t know how it will play out. It’s shortsighted to dismiss it all together.
There’s emacs, vim, and popular extensions of the two. OpenBSD, lots of distros (some do develop their own software), SDL,…