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The fate of "small" open source

(nolanlawson.com)
295 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Nov 25 19:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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levkk ◴[16 Nov 25 20:30 UTC] No.45948142[source]▶
Several issues:

1. Reducing dependencies is a wrong success metric. You just end up doing more work yourself, except you can't be an expert in everything, so your code is often strictly worse.

2. Regenerating the same solutions with a probabilistic machine will produce bugs a certain percentage of the time. Dependencies are always the same code (when versioned).

3. Cognitive overhead for human review is higher with LLM-generated libs, for no additional benefit.

replies(1): >>45948160 #
1. jcelerier ◴[16 Nov 25 20:33 UTC] No.45948160[source]▶
> Reducing dependencies is a wrong success metric. You just end up doing more work yourself

Except it's just not true in many cases because of social systems we've built. If I want to ship software to Debian I have to make sure that every single of my 3rdparty dependencies is registered and packaged as a proper debian package - a lot of time it will take much less work to rewrite some code than to get 25 100-lines-of-code micro-libraries accepted into debian.