‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don’t fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Archive: http://archive.today/sgl5M

  • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    18·
    1 day ago

    It really is time for UBI - this would take financial pressure off of OSS coders (and everyone else) and ensure that there will always be new source material for the data hungry AI companies.

      • Wildmimic@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        4·
        22 hours ago

        Agreed. Would be actually cool if the reason UBI gets realized is the need for human creativity in all their forms - if big tech would push in that direction i couldn’t even argue against it.

        • reksas@sopuli.xyz
          3·
          20 hours ago

          i think the reason we do not have ubi universally is it would remove one of the biggest leverages companies have. If you dont have to worry about becoming homeless and starving to death, you can’t be coerced into accepting any work for shitty pay. And people who dont have so many worries might start thinking about things beyond immidiate survival and how to distract themselves from it.