The fate of "small" open source

I don’t think open source is going anywhere. It’s posed to get significantly stronger — as the devs which care about it learn how to leverage AI tools to make things that corporate greasemonkeys never had the inspiration to. Low quality code spammers are just marketing themselves for jobs where they can be themselves: soulless and devoid of creative impulse.

That’s the thing: open source is the only place where the true value (or lack of value) of these tools can be established — the only place where one can test mettle against metal in a completely unconstrained way.

Did you ever want to build a compiler (or an equally complex artifact) but got stuck on various details? Try now. It’s going to stand up something half-baked, and as you refine it, you will learn those details — but you’ll also learn that you can productively use AI to reach past the limits of your knowledge, to make what’s beyond a little more palatable.

All the things people say about AI is true to some degree: my take is that some people are rolling the slots to win a CRUD app, and others are trying to use it to do things that they could only imagine before —- and open source tends to be the home of the latter group.

> It’s posed to get significantly stronger

It's really not. Every project of any significance is now fending off AI submissions from people who have not the slightest fucking clue about what is involved in working on long-running, difficult projects or how offensive it is to just slather some slop on a bug report and demand it is given scrutiny.

Even at the 10,000 feet view it has wasted people's time because they have to sit down and have a policy discussion about whether to accept AI submissions, which involves people reheating a lot of anecdotal claims about productivity.

Having learned a bit about how to write compilers I know enough to know that I can guarantee you that an AI cannot help you solve the difficult problems that compiler-building tools and existing libraries cannot solve.

It's the same as it is with any topic: the tools exist and they could be improved, but instead we have people shoehorning AI bollocks into everything.

This isn't an AI issue. It is a care issue. People shouldn't submit PRs to project where they don't care enough to understand the project they are submitting to or the code they are submitting. This has always been a problem, there is nothing new. The thing that is new is more people can get to a point where they can submit regardless of their care or understanding. A lot of people are trying to gild their resume by saying they contributed to a project. Blaming AI is blaming the wrong problem. AI is a a tool like a spreadsheet. Project owners should instead be working ways to filter out careless code more efficiently.