‘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
    141·
    8 hours 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·
        5 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
          2·
          3 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.

  • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
    8·
    8 hours ago

    Vibe Coding is Killing Open Source Software

    FTFY. The only difference is that with FOSS the slop is visible to all.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    72·
    14 hours ago

    “Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS

    “Monetize direct user engagement”, does that mean their argument is that AI makes it so people don’t need to pay devs to handhold them through using very user unfriendly software?

    • eltoukan@jlai.lu
      8·
      6 hours ago

      They give the example of Tailwind CSS, who sell UI blocks/kits and templates. I think that sounds like more added value than just pay me to help you use my software.

      This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

      Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can’t afford to maintain the framework.

      Even for projects that don’t advertise commercial products, I can believe that not needing to leave the chat/IDE to do anything leads to less traffic on GitHub etc, which is where the donate buttons are for ex.

  • ProbablyBaysean@lemmy.ca
    34·
    14 hours ago

    I can walk through tricky logic.

    I can pentest and determine issues or if a solution works.

    I dont know what is important. I dont know how to rebase git commits and get a pat token unless ai is holding my hand.

    I right now only vibe code but I then deep dive through the finalized commits. I am not a programmer by trade and at best I’m a sloperator.

    I think my code contributions are helpful.

    • knokelmaat@beehaw.org
      5·
      8 hours ago

      What types of projects do you contribute to? Do you indicate that your contributions are done using AI?

      • ProbablyBaysean@lemmy.ca
        2·
        4 hours ago

        So far, I have made a full stack server on a rpi from only ai and pentesting. It is deployed (live and used by my coworkers as a part of their workday). I intend to open source it once I understand more about git.

        I recently have made one pull request on one project that js very well maintained and I indicated that I used ai and it is really eye opening to see what good development/maintaining looks like.

        I am currently doing a deep dive into each of the feedback notes (left by a collaborator). I am by no means fast as I’m trying to max my learning from each scrap of interaction and error. Several concepts are hard for me to remember well so I use my high level memory and commands to the ai each time they come up.