Will Open Source Survive the Agents That Replaced It?

ed_elliott_asc

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

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.

mikodin

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

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

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

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

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

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.

addag

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

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.

timr

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

Krei-se

"Maybe what’s actually happening here isn’t death or survival, it’s a change of job" AI sentence structure spills everywhere

1298ahg

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.

JV00

I think there will be a difference between foundational software and application software. The more you go to the outer layer the more code will be generated on the spot, throw-away, single usage. On the other extreme, foundational software that is battle tested, security hardened, has survived waves of AI-hacking, will become irreplaceable and crystallise as a semi-immutable layer. Open source is in the best position to win foundational software while agents will dominate the outer layer of disposable code.

jchw

Why is this on the frontpage again? It's slop writing with a blatantly untrue borderline ragebait premise. Can we please stop this madness? Hacker News doesn't have a downvote feature (for stories), and that absolutely does have its pros and cons, but this needs to stop. This is basically SPAM.

VCFundedGenYer

What? Author (which seems like AI) has no idea what open source even means.

sehw

Fuck intellectual property and shit. LLMs fuck yeah!

dwheeler

False premise. AIs dont generate anything in 30 seconds that has been widely reviewed and tested. If you want it to be corrrct, it's always easier to install some existing OSS and instead focus on whatever is unique to you.

eggbrain

This is the biggest opportunity in open source I've seen in my lifetime. I bet you in three years we'll have more and better open source libraries than ever before. For example, a few months ago I was looking to build a license detection tool, and within a few weeks with the help of Claude built a tool that was 20x better than the best open source one I found (I also open sourced mine as well: https://github.com/licensedetector/cli ). The biggest problem will be navigating through the glut of libraries that have been written in my mind -- 100 tools for the same use case, all with < 100 stars will make it hard to decide between. Also, if the user didn't write them thinking about anything other than their own use cases when releasing their library, the standard response will probably be for the agent or programmer to recreate the wheel yet again, only for their specific use case, making it now 101 tools for the same use case.

MiscIdeaMaker99

What does it mean for open source to survive? Exactly what software are we talking about here? I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but the AI agent that I use every day at work would rather install a tool or library than spend tokens recreating software that already exists out there. As such, the argument doesn't make much sense to me, personally.