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Comment by koteelok | Hacker News Reader

Stuff like this makes me wish AI had never happened.

An open-source projects losing the ability to find and mentor new maintainers is so disappointing.

They have rewritten a huge change of their project using llms.

Patches were coming less and less often for years prior to AI; it turns out that decreasing inflation-adjusted wages Y-o-Y plus ending desktop computer education in schools is the unnoticed death knell that AI highlighted. When no one can afford to hack on programs in their free time using skills they can’t afford to train (both due to monetary and time-versus-jobs costs) then of course open source will fade.

How is it really related to AI? there have been issues with open-source and maintainers for a long long time

In the post, the ladybird maintainers say that they trust pull requests less than they used to, because many pull requests are authored by AI now. A big pull request no longer signals that the submitter put in a lot of work into it and it's committed to developing and maintaining quality code.

My friend, the very article we are talking about this mentions this directly

This is direct result of AI as you can see in many other public repos.

before AI like 1 in 1000 would spend their time fixing something they had no idea about and even then considering how much time you spent and how few of those happened it made sense to review/talk about it.

now every "dev" with claude submits prs having absolutely no idea what they are even doing. most of them would not even be able to create PR without AI in the first place.

and on top of that add slop bots that "fix" issues in the loop and create hundreds of PRs daily

Not sure if this happened to ladybird, but the amount of junk vibecoded AI-slop pull requests has been putting an immense amount of strain on many open-source maintainers. Reviewing stuff like that is intensely energy draining an most of the time your comments will just be copy-pasted into claude code and the "contributor" will put in 0 effort themselves to try to make the code readable or maintainable.

Before AI, being open source and having to manage issues and PR's was already a huge task, burning out maintainers left and right. Now with AI, anyone with a terminal and a claude code subscription can open PR's...

Maintainers can also use the exact same tools to help review and validate PRs

So the solution is for FOSS developers to pay large sums of money to AI companies, to solve the problem that the AI companies created, for profit? ... and you typed this out as though extorting charities were a solution, instead of a grotesquely immoral and unethical systemic failure?

I'm on your side, but don't you think 'grotesquely immoral and unethical' is a bit of an exhaggeration? It's just software.

Software has an ethical dimension, and it's ignorant or disingenuous to dismiss that.

No, these things don’t exist in a vacuum. Most LLMs were trained on huge amounts of copyrighted works that they then regurgitate portions of without regard to license or copyright holder, and without attribution.

Why do you believe morals and ethics do not apply to software? Would you say nuclear weapons are "just physics"? What about the software involved? In that context, software is a tool that can make or break civilizations.

Honestly, this kind of disregard and reductive reasoning comes across as corrupt and sociopathic. The sentiment is a recurring theme I see on HN more than any other forum, and representative of the moral and ethical systemic failure permeating modern business and governance; how most politicians, investors, and leaders treat their users/customers/employees/constituents adversarially, as though they are marks to be fooled, manipulated, and exploited without conscience.

We should always hold each other accountable and ensure our beliefs and actions are conducive to improving everyones quality of life and standard of living. Software is no exception. These should not just be virtues to be signaled through marketing, or while standing on a pulpit, or being recorded. They are how we should strive to live our lives in private, even when nobody is watching.

So 50 years ago people who created calculators were at fault for people not calculating from memory? or 100 years ago people who created engines were at fault for people not doing manual labor anymore?

Interesting. I don't remember calculators or engines being required to solve the problems they created... nor monthly subscription fees to maintain protection from those problems... nor the companies responsible profiting off the amplification of labor, cost, time, and effort inflicted on non-profits; nothing remotely similar to the problems AI companies have forced on FOSS.

Perhaps you could provide some examples?

AI reviewing AI. Or in other words, having non-deterministic systems review the creation of non-deterministic systems, hoping for a deterministic result. Good luck with that.

This is only because of AI. In the past the barrier for contribution was high because you had to know what you are doing and put effort.

Nowadays any AI lunatic with a couple of tokens to spare can spare no effort, have no understanding and still flood you with a wall of code that on first look might even look okay (spoiler: it's actually trash). That is tiring for maintainers.

This is all about AI

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