Yet another Hacker News

Will Open Source Survive the Agents That Replaced It?

17 points albertoarena 1 hour ago 30 comments

ed_elliott_asc 41 minutes ago | parent

AI is causing everything to change, small basically trivial oss projects are no longer really needed - that doesn’t seem too bad, we can focus on the more exciting things now!

someguyiguess 37 minutes ago | parent

I’ve often wondered the opposite. The number of pieces of software I used to pay for that I was able to replace with software I’ve built using agents is nearing double digits. I wonder how much longer people will need to pay huge software companies instead of just collaborate with a few other folks using AI and build their own better version.

piker 31 minutes ago | parent

As a developer (it sounds like), you were probably never even a drop in the bucket dumped into the ocean of the proprietary software market. Most people don’t want to change their own oil.

ChrisLTD 20 minutes ago | parent

Developers don’t even like to pay for their own code editors. Something they used to work in all day.

bayindirh 11 minutes ago | parent

I'll personally pay (and do pay) for good development tools. I prefer free software tools primarily due to ethical and philosophical reasons (and I also want my code doesn't depend on any tool which can't be obtained in the future), but I have a couple of non-blocker, high quality, yet closed source tools in my arsenal.

glimshe 27 minutes ago | parent

Roughly zero.

Not only you're making huge assumptions on AI's ability to build software useable by non-software engineers without professional input, you're also underestimating people's desire to pay just for convenience ("gee, I need a diet tracker, let me find a few people to help me vibe code it instead of paying $10")

intrasight 18 minutes ago | parent

It's a valid assumption, and it is going to have a huge impact on the SaaS marketplace. "I need a resource tracking application. Let me find a consultant to help me vibe code it rather than pay $10,000 a month."

bcjdjsndon 6 minutes ago | parent

Hiring a consultant to vibe code isnt the same as a non technical vibe coder, the whole point he's making.

bayindirh 20 minutes ago | parent

I have paid a relatively big price for a software which does a simple thing: Drawing diagrams. The application? It's called OmniGraffle pro. That simple looking program drawing diagrams can do flowcharts to scaled architectural or industrial diagrams and everything in between.

Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.

Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.

These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.

Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.

We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.

jlkuester7 7 minutes ago | parent

This. I happily pay for IntelliJ software (even though basically everything else I use is FLOSS). It is not really this feature or that feature of WebStorm that makes it worth while, but just that 40+ hours of the weeks it just works. For normal stuff, for edge cases, small projects, big repos. When I need something, it just works (with out me needing to fiddle with an agent to build me some brittle scripting that will kinda work today, but break tomorrow....).

Forgeties79 15 minutes ago | parent

Can that software work on other machines that aren’t configured the exact way yours is? Will they survive the next OS update? How about 3?

I’ve seen this claim so many times but I struggle to believe people are running vibe coded software replacements as daily drivers. Certainly not in a professional environment. They are all invariably interesting little projects at best.

mikodin 35 minutes ago | parent

As I've been vibe coding a side project, I've been curious on just how much cruft and slop the agents are training on now. A part of me feels like I should actually have it be in a private repo.

wongarsu 28 minutes ago | parent

I've noticed that for smaller projects (<=10k lines of code) the valuable thing is no longer source or binary artifacts, it's the encoded ideas, architecture and domain knowledge. A folder of plan files is about as valuable as the code itself, and easier to adapt to new domains

I wonder if that will spawn a new type of open source project. Where we have free exchange of ideas, without necessarily requiring the free exchange of code (which would violate a lot of Stallmann's ideas about open source, but might ironically be attractive to people who dislike AI training on their code)

cc62cf4a4f20 23 minutes ago | parent

For one off tools, sure. For ongoing tools, either they are right after the first implementation and you use them for years. Alternatively, you need to maintain them and they decay until you discard them.

You also need to be ok with your tool to do task A (you had an agent build) to work different from my tool to do task A (I had an agent build). Meaning we can’t reliably compare the output from those tools.

strogonoff 22 minutes ago | parent

The ecosystem of open-source reusable components will remain a good idea as long as architectural principles like low coupling and high cohesion still apply—otherwise it’s wasting resources on reinventing wheels.

0xbadcafebee 18 minutes ago | parent

A lot of us out there don't make Open Source for rewards. We just like sharing things. I have about 10 users for one of my projects. If I had 10,000 it would be the same. I'm just glad anybody found it useful. And I like using other projects because at the end of the day I don't want to sit here writing code (even AI code), I just want a solution to my problem.

Maybe there will be fewer Open Source contributors. But maybe there will be even more of them with AI making the labor and maintenance easier. Either way I will still be publishing my dinky project, because it works for me, so maybe it'll work for someone else.

zkmon 16 minutes ago | parent

Agents replaced open source? An Agent is an actor and open source is an artifact. An actor can't replace an artifact.

Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms and the community around it.

bakugo 4 minutes ago | parent

> Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms

Licensing terms that are now irrelevant, since anyone can use AI to rewrite it without the license.

> the community around it.

Open source communities are dying due to AI spam.

addag 13 minutes ago | parent

Putting aside the bond I have towards with the FOSS community, I am curious of what will be the new equilibrium of this ecosystem.

brightball 12 minutes ago | parent

It seems like the opportunity is for open source to explode thanks to AI. This week I replaced my home security camera system with open source Frigate, because I was able to use AI to take the source code, replace the object detection models that were included with the code with something that was a better fit for my machine, customize how the videos were stored and under what circumstances. There's a lot more that I can do with it that I haven't yet as well.

I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.

It seems like we'll see a lot more customized open source options or rapidly accelerated open source projects thanks to this type of thing. I'm really curious to see if something like LibreOffice stops playing catchup with Microsoft and actually passes it.

If the improvement rate of Omarchy for Linux desktop experience can be a barometer for anything, I'm extremely optimistic.

The #1 barrier for me to do 90% of the things that I've done for myself over the last 3 months for the prior 10-15 years has been time. I'm more than capable of downloading Frigate and figuring out how to customize everything, modify and compile the code to do what I want, but it would have taken me hours to days to do it. Now I can setup a couple of stacked /goal prompts overnight and get there. It's fantastic.

SkiFire13 5 minutes ago | parent

> This week I replaced my home security camera system with open source Frigate, because I was able to use AI to take the source code, replace the object detection models that were included with the code with something that was a better fit for my machine, customize how the videos were stored and under what circumstances. There's a lot more that I can do with it that I haven't yet as well. > > I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.

You also didn't give anything to opensource. This shows that AI can allow open source to be used in more cases and in more flexible ways, but in no way does this mean that open source (and especially the good high quality one) will explode.

If anything we saw an explosion of open source projects, most of them low quality slop, and even the ones that used to be high quality are slowly degrading.

timr 10 minutes ago | parent

This article has so many signs of being written by an LLM that I couldn’t finish it.

Krei-se 5 minutes ago | parent

100% the smoking gun. It's not the thought that counts, it's the typing you save. You don`t need to read the text, it's not enough. You need to digest the slop.

Krei-se 9 minutes ago | parent

"Maybe what’s actually happening here isn’t death or survival, it’s a change of job"

AI sentence structure spills everywhere

bcjdjsndon 5 minutes ago | parent

Surely this is an artefact of the training data?

Krei-se 3 minutes ago | parent

it's not an artifact, it's thinking out loud guardrails

1298ahg 3 minutes ago | parent

Nothing has been replaced. This is just propaganda by a consultant who explicitly is for hire for AI integrations. He has probably never done anything in open source.

He uses open source and sells it out for cheap marketing. Clients take note.