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😩 If you want to be absurdly narrow minded and treat OSI like some deity, their word like a holy book, and anything outside of that scripture or benediction as heresy, then maybe you’ll see the arrival of AI as some kind of ragnarok.
Opensource will change but it won’t be “killed”. You can’t and won’t stop people putting the code for their projects online. The stuff you (or your agent or whatever) publish will continue to be used as an open portfolio.
A good amount of stuff published will be filth and indistinguishable from clonker filth or human filth. Additionally, local AI will also become more common. Making your code indistinguishable will also make the “AI code is unlicensable” argument worthless. Go prove that the trash heap I published was written while drunk and high or by an AI.
Some projects are already quietly saying “just don’t tell people it’s AI” and to make it look indistinguishable, then get on with life.
Can’t say I have any good rebuttals against that tbh.
That’s pretty much the subtext of bans anyway. To guarantee undetectable use the contributor must treat gen code like a junior’s draft and refactor prior to PR. If it’s undetectable, the end result is the same from the maintainer’s perspective.
And it’s not a new approach. This has long been true for contributions containing “found” code; we define what’s allowed knowing we can’t actually enforce the rule against the most artfully obfuscated violations because, aside from achieving ostensibly the same result, having that tappable sign protects the project from a lot of BS down the line.
Slop projects and slop submissions existed before the current crop of AI but it’s certainly lowered the barrier. That said I suspect there are places AI can help. Simple patches, human guided refactores, test cases. We’ll have data points from the projects that turned on the slop cannons and started auto accepting PRs soon enough.
Yeah, I think calling out the demise of opensource is too early as there isn’t enough data to support such a position.
Overall I agree, but it is missing and important aspect: maintainability.
This is maybe the most insidious part of LLM use to write code. Since LLMs have no real understanding of the structure of the project they will duplicate functions and generally make a mess that very quickly becomes unmaintainable by humans. The only “solution” LLM users have for that is perpetually rewriting large swaths of the codebase introducing new bugs, removing features and so on.
Since open-source software is usually especially long lived and maintained by a changing group of people, this results in code bases that are like asbestos that no one wants to even touch.
In addition to the other comments here, we can’t rule out the human love for hobbies either. Did I spend 2 days hand coding an entire blog that I won’t show to anyone just for fun to learn some HTML and CSS? Hell yeah I did. Will I use that knowledge to make something less chaotically coded that I can actually be proud of? More than likely.
Obviously that won’t be a large percentage of the market if even a noticeable one but, I’d like to think hobbyists will help preserve some good open source projects.
I was thinking the other day how easy it would be for someone malicious to put a back door in whatever AI slop they make
I’d almost rather see all AI generated content be posted to its own separate open source platform “GitSlop” or something
I think ai will enhance open source projects. Maybe not all, but some. World be be completely different in 10-20 years anyway.
When we have something even remotely resembling this mythical AI that has fundamentally different characteristics from LLMs maybe we can talk about it instead of speculating