11 ms·

> 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

> 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.

paulryanrogers 2mo ago
You still have to track upstream and merge conflicts. Or else you have to get LLMs to fix all the CVEs in your fork.
- otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- midasz 2mo ago
  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/skills/upstream-sync https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...
  - cyanydeez 2mo ago
    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.
atomicnumber3 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  > 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 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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.
blauditore 2mo ago
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.
- fragmede 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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 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.
    - InvertedRhodium 2mo ago
      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.
thegrim33 2mo ago
"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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
  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.
sixtyj 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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.
nullsanity 2mo ago
[dead]
yowlingcat 2mo ago
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.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
jayd16 2mo ago
It's no one making consumer facing software with AI?

paulryanrogers 2mo ago

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

otabdeveloper4 2mo ago
[flagged]
midasz 2mo ago
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/skills/upstream-sync https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce/tree/main/.claude/ski...
- cyanydeez 2mo ago
  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.

atomicnumber3 2mo ago

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 2mo ago
> 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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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.

blauditore 2mo ago

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.

fragmede 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  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 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.
  - InvertedRhodium 2mo ago
    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.

thegrim33 2mo ago

"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 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
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.

sixtyj 2mo ago

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 2mo ago
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 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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.

nullsanity 2mo ago

[dead]

yowlingcat 2mo ago

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.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

jayd16 2mo ago

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