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Comment by dovesky | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can, which is also why Open Source is effectively dead thanks to AI.

Open Source is a movement of people who want to voluntarily collaborate on and share software. As long as there are people who want to do that, it will continue. I don't see anyone suddenly stopping doing that just because AI exists. Lots of open source projects are banning AI contributions, yet they're chugging along just as before.

Honestly I think we're going to see a lot less AI-written code in the future, and more AI-assistance (PR reviews, documentation, security scans, scaffolding, brainstorming, test suites, etc). Example: to ship one feature for my open source project with a collaborator, we went back and forth for a month to agree on the change, test it, approve it, merge it. The code was pretty tiny. We could get more contributions faster if AI can help us tighten up that lifecycle.

Yeah I agree. I think whether we see more or less AI-written code is very much down to where.

Adding a new filter option for in-product analytics (assuming that data is being captured) is something AI can do reasonably well.

But things like “how should our orchestration layer be architected” isn’t a question of execution, so AI won’t be much use.

I've been a FOSS contributor since the early 2000s, I've stopped contributing and stopped maintaining projects completely in recent years, except for when I am paid, or where there is a problem that affects me directly that I can't workaround easily. I don't feel the FOSS community values that formed part of my identity are represented in the community much these days, and AI has made that situation worse.

As long as open source projects avoid using AI, surely? Why wouldn't they be able to reap the benefits also?

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