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> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project

And this is why eventually you are likely to run the artisanal coders who tend to do most of the true innovation out of the room.

Because by and large, agentic coders don't contribute, they make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them and the code quality is questionable at best.

Eventually, I'm sure LLM code quality will catch up, but the ease with which an existing codebase can be forked and slightly tuned, instead of contributing to the original, is a double edged sword.

Maybe! Or maybe there is really a competitive advantage to "artisanal" coding.

Personally, I would not currently expect a fork of RedoxOS that is AI-implemented to become more popular than RedoxOS itself.

Indeed, maybe there is. I'm interested to see how it plays out.

"make their own fork which nobody else is interested in because it is personalized to them"

Isn't that literally how open-source works, and why there's so many Linux distros?

Code quality is a subjective term as well, I feel like everyone dunking on AI coding is a defensive reaction - over time this will become an entirely acceptable concept.

For a human to be able to do any customization, they have to dive into the code and work with it, understand it, gain intuition for it. Engage with the maintainers and community. In the process, there's a good chance that they'll be encouraged to contribute improvements upstream even if they have their own fork.

Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.

Perhaps the long term steady state will be a goldilocks renaissance of open source where lots of new ideas and contributors spring up, made capable with AI assistance. But so far what I've seen is the opposite. These people just feed existing work into their LLMs, produce derivative works and never bother to engage with the original authors or community.

> Vibe coders don't have to do any of this. They don't have to understand anything, they can just have their LLMs do some modifications that are completely opaque to the vibe coder.

I spend time using my agent to better understand existing codebases and their best practices than I'd ever have the time/energy to do before, giving me a broader and more holistic view on whatever I'm changing, before I make a change.

Okay, but you don't have to - and "efficient" coders won't bother, thus starving the commons.

Well, I would argue that if I didn't spend that time, then even a personal fork that I vibe coded would be worse, even for me personally. It would be incompatible with upstream changes, more likely to crash or have bugs, more difficult to modify in the future (and cause drift in the model's own output) etc.

I always find it odd that people say both that vibe coding has obvious and immediate negative consequences in terms of quality and at the same time that nobody could learn or be incentivized to produce better architecture and code quality from vibe coding when they would obviously face those consequences.

I think that in the long run, AI assisted coding will turn out to be better than handcrafted code. When you pay for every token, and code generation is quick, a clean, low entropy codebase with good test coverage gets you a lot more for your dollar than a dog's breakfast. It's also much easier to fix bad decisions made early on in a project's life, because the machine is doing all of the heavy lifting.

This also lines up with the history of automation in many other industries. Modern manufacturing is capable of producing parts that a medieval blacksmith couldn't dream of, for example. Sure, maybe an artisan can produce better code than an llm now, but AI assisted humans will beat them in the near future if they aren't already producing similar quality output at greater speed, and tomorrow's models will fix the bad code written today. The fact that there's even a discussion on automated vs hand written today means that the writing is almost certainly on the wall.

You mean like I have to pay my compiler to turn high level code into low level code?

I mean, I do open PRs for most of my changes upstream if they allow AI, once I've been using the feature for a few weeks and have fixed the bugs and gone over the code a few times to make sure it's good quality. Also, I'm going to be using the damn thing, I don't want it to be constantly broken either, and I don't want the code to get hacky and thus incompatible with upstream or cause the LLMs to drift, so I usually spend a good amount of time making sure the code is high quality — integrates with the existing architecture and model of the world in the code, follows best practices, covers edge cases, has tests, is easy to read so that I can review it easily.

But if a project bans AI then yeah, they'll be run out of town because I won't bother trying to contribute.

Most "artisanal" coders that are complaining are working on the n-1000th text editor, todo list manager, toy programming language or web framework that nobody needs, not doing "true innovation".

Well at least you, agentic coders, already understand they need to fork off.

Saves the rest of us from having to tell you.

>> but also make it available for others in case other people want to use it for the extra features and polish as well.

this feels like the place where your approach breaks down. I have had very poor results trying to build a foundation that CAN be polished, or where features don't quickly feel like a jenga tower. I'm wondering if the success we've seen is because AI is building on top of, or we're early days in "foundational" work? Is anyone aware of studies comparing longer term structural aspects? is it too early?

I've been able to make very clear, modular, well put together architectural foundations for my greenfield projects with AI. We don't have studies, of course, so it is only your anecdote versus mine.

> We, agentic coders, can easily enough fork their project and add whatever the features

Bold of you to assume that people won’t move (and their code along with it) to spaces where parasitic behaviour like this doesn’t occur, locking you out.

In addition to just being a straight-up rude, disrespectful and parasite position to take, you’re effectively poisoning your own well.

Since when is maintaining a personal patch set / fork parasitic? And in what way does it harm them, such that they should move to spaces where it doesn't happen, as a result? Also, isn't the entire point of open source precisely to enable people to make and use modifications of code if they want even if they don't want to hand code over? Also, that would be essentially making code closed source — do you think OSS is just going to die completely? Or would people make alternative projects? Additionally, this assumes coders who are fine with AI can't make anything new themselves, when if anything we've seen the opposite (see the phenomenon of reimplementing other projects that's been going around).

Additionally, if they accept AI contributions, I try, when I have the time and energy, make sure my PRs are high quality, and provide them. If they don't, then I'll go off and do my own thing, because that's literally what they asked me to do, and I wasn't going to contribute otherwise. I fail to see how that's rude or parasitic or disrespectful in any way except my assumption that the more featureful and polished forks might eventually win out.

Its only parasitic if you are tricking users into thinking you are the original or providing something better. You could be providing something different (which would be valuable) but if you are not, you are just scamming users for your own benefit.

I have no intention of tricking anyone into thinking I'm the original! I do think I offer improvements in some cases, so in cases where the project is something I intend for other people to ever see/use, I do explain why I think it is better, but I also will always put the original prominently to make sure people can find their way back to that if they want to. For example, the only time I've done this so far:

https://github.com/alexispurslane/jjdag