[hamandcheese]

> where’s all this new magical software that the productivity improvements should imply?

It's running, privately, in my homelab.

I think we are entering what I call the "have it your way" era. If an open source project doesn't do exactly what you want it to do, fork it, or create a new version. It's too easy.

This makes me a bit concerned about the future of open source. Upstreaming used to be worth it, since maintaining a fork is effort too. But now the balance has shifted significantly. Especially with many projects becoming a lot stricter about contributing, and some becoming outright hostile to AI. I can't blame them. But I think the effect will be that improvements are less likely to make it back to the community as AI adoption increases.

[atomicnumber3]

Remember: code is free as in "free puppy". FOSS communities were never valuable because of the code. It was the shared written and oral traditions that make the software useful, usable, and updated.

[hobofan]

> that make the software useful, usable, and updated

There is a lot of OSS software out there (e.g. in scientific communities) that I would say would barely qualify for each of those three attributes. The main reason it's valuable for the respective communities, is because it's the only thing that's available.

[bayindirh]

Developing scientific software is disproportionately hard though. Making it usable, useful and keeping it updated is even harder.

There's two reasons for that. The math is generally very unorthodox and alien for a seasoned developer, and software development practices are equally alien for the scientist who can understand and evolve the math behind it.

I have written a boundary element method evaluator for my Ph.D. not only math was alien, the required coding techniques for making it fast is very different for a standard developer. You have to have the perseverance and interest to do that. I chose that path intently and I do not regret a millisecond of it.

The problem is, if you don't have a dedicated team to continue that codebase (e.g.: like the Eigen team), your code is basically done and done. If somebody doesn't share the same passion, it's almost impossible for someone to take and carry it forward.

Oh, due to the math and optimizations, the code's structure need to be both documented and the next batch of developer(s) have to be tutored by the person who's giving the code to them.

[asdff]

In some fields the scientific software is actually simple, no crazy math. But rather than esoteric math knowledge there are say baked in assumptions and context from the domain that is hard to gleam from the outside without steeping yourself in the field to the point you might as well earn a PhD from it. And of course the same issues where there is no funding for long term support. Not necessarily as big an issue as with general software on that though, because the tools are generally complete in the “does what it says on the tin” sense, no new features are planned nor needed per say, no security considerations, it is probably written in a decades old language that will be around for decades still, etc.

[worik]

> If somebody doesn't share the same passion, it's almost impossible for someone to take and carry it forward.

True, five years ago.

The advent of coding agents has changed everything, and often make modifying somebody else's bespoke software practical

[bayindirh]

If your software is CRUDe or has many alternatives/examples on the web, altering it with an LLM is easy, since the model already knows what you're working on.

When the math you're working on bespoke, and the optimizations you do are intricate, these models and agents fall flat on their face, because there's no "a set of widely used optimizations" (i.e. an open repository of very nicely optimized code for cases X, Y and Z) to apply on top of the codebase.

By bespoke, I mean, there's only one academic paper written about it, and it's written by me and my supervisor.

[robocat]

This is clearest when we create open source communities that are not centered around a code project.

Stack overflow was an amazing open documentation community. Even if the code snippets were less amazing.

One central fault of GNU is their focus on their code and their problematic Jiu-Jitsu attempt to force reluctant companies into doing open-source.

Then again the history of Chromium is less about community - I'm not sure where that fits in my world modeling.

(reedited - clarified words)

[browski]

What makes computers useful is solving problems

I don't care if they adhere to written and oral traditions of the past or some other means

I need to add and divide and test values in memory. I don't care what it looks like to do that.

I don't need a passenger telling me how to drive. Why would I want a patronizing coder telling me how to use a machine?

[blauditore]

You will likely end up in maintenance hell soon. This will likely not be much easier with AI because coding is not the hard/annoying part, it's the fact that you need to dust off every little project every time a tiny fix is needed, and that's a lot of toil in the long run.

[pianopatrick]

Seems to me this would get easier or harder depending on how you write the code. Like if you write the code in something standard and unchanging like POSIX shell scripts or C99 or ES5 javascript, at least the ecosystem won't change out from under you. If you use rust or python or a bunch of node.js dependencies then you might have to edit the project just to keep up with ecosystem changes.

[asdff]

Updating the project env and getting breaking changes is a self inflicted wound, to be honest.

[fragmede]

Maybe? I ran across an old pre-LLM project of mine recently, and past me was an asshole and didn't leave a readme for future me. Meanwhile post-LLM projects at least have a readme that the LLM generated for me or my agent to read and pick up context on. Being able to ask an agent what is this repo, what's going on here? Hey just make it do this, instead of toilsomely digging in and doing it tmmyself, seems to say that might not come to pass.

There is, of course, the question of if that's making me dumber. It might be, but there are other brain training things I'm doing outside of that to force my brain to do the thing.

[dakolli]

The fact that you're even saying this it is probably an admission that you do think it's making you dumber. Most people I know, who are honest with themselves, have admitted to me that they feel like it's making them dumber or "zombifying" them. This is also well studied already, https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

LLMs are poison for the brain, I'm almost certain of it, at least when used in the way most people are using them. If you drive everywhere because you don't want to walk (but you could), you're obviously going to be physically worse off than if you walked. This is the case with llms, if you have them do all the thinking, planning and action you're going to be cognitively worse off than if you didn't use them.

[vilos1611]

It's pretty easy to generalize this, but it doesn't match my perception. People who are using llms to do things they could have already done, but faster, probably have atrophying skill sets. People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves. The problems are just much bigger.

The average Joe can easily vibe code apps that took a small startup just a few years ago. If developers are also using AI to build the same simple apps - then yeah. They're not pushing themselves hard enough, and probably not using their brains as much anymore.

[dakolli]

I don't see average Joes vibe coding apps that before took a small startup, I see a lot of cheap talk around that idea, but no receipts ... I see some incredibly simple chrome extensions and the such out there, with their api keys hard coded in their client side code lol

[smcg]

My perception is that this guy's response to "I forgot to write a readme" was "I should limit myself to tools that do it for me" instead of instilling discipline about documentation.

[4ffad]

"People who are using these tools to accomplish significantly more difficult or complex work than they used to are absolutely finding new ways to push themselves"

hahaha this is a miniscule amount of people.

most people do not care about their job, only to the extent it is a source of income. but they do not care about it anything more than that. and they shouldnt either!

you live in delululand.

[CrazyStat]

This matches my experience as a statistician who used to begrudgingly write bad code when I had to. LLMs have opened up huge new possibilities for me.

No doubt there's some Gell-Mann amnesia going on, because I regularly have to correct them from doing stuff that's really dumb based on my expertise within my area of specialization. More than once I've managed to extract >3 orders of magnitude performance gains after asking them to justify why their code was so slow. Probably there's still some stupid stuff in there. But it's better than the code I would have written, and I never could have paid for a proper developer to write it.

[InvertedRhodium]

Socrates thought the same of reading and writing, that it would weaken the memory and isolate people from one another.

1966 saw the peak of calculator protests, where math teachers claimed similar things of calculators.

[asdff]

Socrates was right, honestly. I would not be surprised if humans are more evolutionarily optimized for that sort of communication and thinking. Maybe socrates noticed that writers/readers vs orators/listeners were indeed generally dumber in the way we consider people riddled with short form social media induced brainrot to also be missing some mental capacity.

Widespread literacy is only a few generations old, arguably I guess. Meanwhile we’ve been speaking to eachother for longer than we’ve been humans. Oral information can be kept longer than written information too it seems. Our oldest kept information is not written down, but in folk stories such as aboriginal tales some tens of thousands of years old.

[4ffad]

THe side benefit for certain entities is that, if you are dumber you are easier to control, influence and manipulate.

Now ask yourself.. who does this benefit? Zuckerberg already generates immmense revenues from it.

[fc417fc802]

TBF I suspect both of those cases are true. Just that the benefits ultimately far outweighed the costs.

[mike741]

all of those predictions seem to have come true

[4ffad]

This is absolutely spot on.

Ive met many people who say the exact same thing.

The worrying thing is these are people who nominally seem smart - what we are seeing is 'smart' is not what we think/was. Smart is the ability to identify an object which is harmful and a) be disciplined about its use b) become a better person who doesnt need to expose themselves to said object.

I actually I had one fella who was very distressed - pouring out all his stresses to a bot. Then I reminded him the bot is literally designed to tend to his nees - not to his benefit - but to the provider of the good whom will manipulate said user later on. He then immediately deleted his accounts.

Many are not aware of whats going on around them - this is very concerning.

[j16sdiz]

Sometime a wrong and misleading README done more harm than good.

It is not that rare to see LLM waste hours on a wrong path because a misleading line in README. Even worse, they can't learn. Spawn a subagent and it repeat the same error again

[al_borland]

Someone on my team started using an LLM to write all his readme files (he used to not write them at all).

So far, 100% of them have been wrong. I read them, my spidey senses think that what it says doesn’t match his style. I look at the code to find the variables the readme mentions doesn’t exist anywhere in the codebase. I then reach out to him about it, where it says it was written by AI and he will go back and write it for real.

He says it’s better than nothing, but agree with you that it does more harm than good. I wasted my time reading slop. I wasted more time validating the slop. I wasted even more time with a conversation about it. Now he’s spending time re-writing something that he could have written faster and better when he was actually writing the code and it was fresh in his mind. Meanwhile, I’m either blocked waiting for him, or I need to spend my time trying to understand the minutiae of his code so I can integrate it into mine.

[peab]

yeah I had this happen to me. Except when I go to maintain it, now cursor/claude are good enough to essentially handle it on their own, so it turns out to be very low effort to maintain.

[cyanydeez]

alternatively, you might end up in 'good enough heaven' and not have to touch it for a decade because, you know, it does exactly as you need and you're not google, microsoft, openAI or antrhopic.

I'd bet there's far more 'good enoughs' than anything else out there. One of the reasons microsoft office is constantly churning subscription, etc is because they solved good enough decades ago and need to justify valuations that just don't matter for most of their user's use cases.

Not everyone is a software developer having to churn out the 101th SaaS that's just because some MBA refuses to hire a dev.

[yowlingcat]

I understand the concern and it's fair but I am very curious about what happens when the two notions of "free" (free as in beer, and free as in freedom) start to diverge because the former gets easier to do.

The latter as always been more durable. Linux doesn't have the mindshare it does because it's "free" as in beer - it's because it's "free" as in freedom.

The price of freedom, of brewing your own beer, is sometimes higher than buying it from the store. But for many folks, the control over the supply chain is what makes it worth it. In LLM-land, it might take a little bit of time for folks to catch up -- or maybe a lot of that is already in motion as companies get paranoid (and rightfully so) to frontier labs getting a little grabby about data. If you need a ZDR environment, "free" as in freedom has a very high premium that you will pay and rightfully so.

[sixtyj]

Creating a fork of an active project only makes sense if you are its sole user (of the fork) and you really need exactly the modification you've been dreaming of.

I have seen so many unnecessary forks of popular projects that I think it's better to stick with the original, even if that means it won't be perfect.

[arjie]

In the old world, this was because keeping in sync with upstream was hard. In the new world, it takes an hour. And because you're the only user, you can test in prod. Makes the whole thing faster. I have lots of forked and family-only software. Some are abandoned upstream etc.

As cost to software goes to zero, these things become easily possible. In the past, I'd only fork top-quality software (things like `xsv` etc. which is easy to edit. These days even complex PHP software I fork with little trouble.

With lots of software, the value is in the data model and algorithm choices. Sometimes I even just point Claude Code / Codex at an open-source thing I want to vendor some functionality into my personal setup with and it gives me what I want. The hard part for me is modeling the data well. That takes experience with encountering things and it's hard to replicate the edges. LLMs often don't get the rough bits right. But someone else's hard work usually has accounted for this.

[sixtyj]

The law of conservation of energy also applies to software. If the price of software approaches zero, it is offset by the time and tokens required to modify and maintain it. Price, time, tokens are simply different expressions of energy.

[arjie]

That doesn’t seem right. The time required to maintain software is less than before. Don’t know about tokens. I suppose they were zero previously and are non-zero now but this does not seem to be a conservation law because as models get better the number of tokens required has become smaller too.

I don’t think this stands up to scrutiny.

[paulryanrogers]

You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.

[midasz]

I'm guilty of creating a fork that just goes off the rails, but still needs to keep up with upstream. I do it via a skill and seems to work good enough for now: https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...

[cyanydeez]

I'm doing it right now to see what the cost is; I cloned the upstream and made a copy of the working directory and asked the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model to merge my production files with the new upstream.

Since it's just a duplicate folder, I can always fall back if it fubars.

[thegrim33]

"This new tool allows for writing all this code ..... but every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy, all decided to only write private software with it that they aren't releasing to the public in any way"

Seems reasonable

[coldtea]

Doesn't have to be "every person and company, in unison, in a grand conspiracy" and other such strawmen.

We could try steelmaning this argument instead: it's enough that most big companies who would otherwise have incentives to contribute.

Before FOSS got in fashion, around the early 2000s, most commercial companies wouldn't touch it as contributors and were openly avert to it, and to open sourcing their stuff. This can be the case again.

[whatisthiseven]

It's dumber than that.

People are shamed for using LLMs at all. So they use them privately, hide them, or disguise their use.

They are definitely being used for public projects. But people are afraid of backlash. Look at some of the comments here.

Hell, Reddit is extraordinarily against LLMs such that even neutral takes are down voted. Mostly by younger generations that aren't in the workforce.

Then you have all the regular people against AI generally.

Ironically there is a conspiracy here. But in the opposite direction.

[jayd16]

It's no one making consumer facing software with AI?