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Comment by matheusmoreira | Hacker News Reader

There are two free software business models:

1. Choosing the most copyleft, most business hostile license imaginable (AGPLv3) and charging for permission to violate it.

2. Relying on crowd funded patronage via platforms like Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Kickstarter.

AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1, and even the biggest projects which are most successful at 2 don't make enough to cover even a single full time developer's salary.

All of my new projects will be private by default from now on.

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> AI's ability to rewrite entire codebases is quickly killing 1

People say things like this, but can you name an instance of this actually happening? What non-trivial existing free software has been displaced in popular use by a vibe-coded alternative?

Anthropic rewrote the MIT licensed Bun. The capability has clearly been demonstrated. As far as I'm concerned, the writing is on the wall.

And it's not just free software either. AI can quickly reverse engineer compiled software too. It's almost scary how it made short work of all the firmwares running on my laptop. Even the days of compiled proprietary software are numbered since AI can trivially make free software out of them.

We live in interesting times. The very act of publishing software at all is now questionable.

That is a first party mechanical rewrite from one language to another. And I'm sure a significant part of the motivation was as a publicity stunt to increase demand for Anthropic's products. If anthropic hadn't acquired bun and had instead "vibe coded" their own replacement, do you think that would have become more popular than bun?

Disassembling a binary to tell you what it does is neat, but it doesn't give you anything new against free software whose source code was public to begin with.

Whereas if you ask it to generate a new large complex piece of software, the amount of human labor required to guide it into producing something that isn't hot garbage and then continue to maintain it indefinitely generally compares unfavorably with the amount it costs to buy a support contract for the existing thing.

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