I'm a cybersecurity 'expert' and my 40 person team and I make our money by providing GPL software to the world that I wrote.
You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also trust you to not extort them. And if you're hit by a bus your product lives on, and someone else can adopt it.
Supply chain risks and vulnerabilities existed before LLMs came along. They're easier to handle now that we have LLMs helping us. In our org the tsunami of updates we need to do weekly is far more easy to handle with LLMs.
Open code has always been easier to find vulns in vs closed. AI didn't change that.
Yeah the slopfest is real, but easier to deal with thanks to agents/LLMs so it kind of offsets itself.
Your licenses are still enforceable in court. Agreed that not being able to reverse the fact that AI trained on your code and is selling that capability kind of sucks. But humans were doing that before AI.
Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due. But on the flip side, we get AI! Which I frikkin love. I feel like a kid in a candy store. It's training on my code too and it's training on my content. And when people ask about what the best product is for our space, the AI tells them its our product. Woohoo!
Regarding the future: We have some really really big problems that need solving - stuff that creates a massive amount of misery in dark stuffy hospital rooms with crying relatives saying goodbye to their 9 year old child. I've been in those spaces and I'd give up the previous generation of open source ethics in a heartbeat to make just an ounce of that misery stop. The training that my code provides AI is a tiny little part of that solution, and I'm proud of that. Whatever I can do to push our capabilities to the point where we can make the major breakthroughs this species needs, I'm happy to provide.
That is kind of net loss at this point. Hey, on the bright side we get onslaught of slop, ai psychosis, constant stream of doom trolling.
And ideology of pointlessness where any time you do or learn anything, you get told that why bother you should have used AI.
The kid forever locked in candy store is happy for a bit, but then they get hungry and feel bad. And no matter how much sugar you eat, it wont get better.
From an ego perspective, the artisan craft of programming basically being dead at this point makes me sad, having spent so much of my life getting good at it (or at least trying to).
From technological enthusiast perspective - if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology, I really don't know what to tell you anymore. I gave credence to AI naysayers for a while, but at this point I feel like its akin to denying gravity exists.
Who are we to gatekeep software development? So many people have gained the ability to interact with computers in ways they never dreamed of before! For me, I've never felt so engaged in software development, even if I'm no longer writing it line by line.
Like you say, there are a lot of negative externalities to this technology, but its something we're going to have to solve rather than dismissing it outright. The industrial revolution caused all sorts of problems! But you can't argue we're worse off because of it.
I don't think it's dead if you have a market which values high-quality, artisanal products.
Sure, artisanal code in itself isn't something inherently sellable but if you pride your program on being a quality product then it's still valuable for others:) AI is basically the new JavaScript in a way.It won't create the next Linux or the next SQLite by itself.
By this point, if you care about a quality product, you should learn how to leverage LLMs for that like running automated audits for correctness and performance opportunities.
There isn't a market for "yeah there's a memory leak but I wrote it by hand."
Fair enough, but as things stand now, the usual LLM-assisted piece of software is usually also partly or wholly LLM-designed too. Not just implemented on a function level or a file level. And LLM design is usually called "slop" because it's nothing spectacular unless you bring fresh ideas to it from a human perspective.
Hand-written memory leaks don't have a market but hand-designed software with hand-designed UX and a hand-designed vision does :)
I'm generally impressed with the code that Fable/Opus is writing for me these days; I would be proud to have had the same foresight had I implemented the solution myself.
And Fable's architectural design is pretty much always well-reasoned and a good place to start.
There's this idea that the best way to use LLMs is to be in the backseat constantly yelling out corrections, but that hasn't been true in my experience for quite some time, though I only use a few sota models.
I think something being slop this late in the game is mainly a reflection of the person using it. I can't really blame AI anymore when pretty much any lever you'd recommend to de-slop it is one prompt away.
I agree with your last bit, and that is the only thing left now that AI solved the technical part.
mmaunder · · focus · HN ↗
You have the same incentive you had to share your work as before, and that is to get attention, and customers, assuming that's your game. Open code means no vendor lockin for a lot of customers, so they can pay you but also trust you to not extort them. And if you're hit by a bus your product lives on, and someone else can adopt it.
Supply chain risks and vulnerabilities existed before LLMs came along. They're easier to handle now that we have LLMs helping us. In our org the tsunami of updates we need to do weekly is far more easy to handle with LLMs.
Open code has always been easier to find vulns in vs closed. AI didn't change that.
Yeah the slopfest is real, but easier to deal with thanks to agents/LLMs so it kind of offsets itself.
Your licenses are still enforceable in court. Agreed that not being able to reverse the fact that AI trained on your code and is selling that capability kind of sucks. But humans were doing that before AI.
Yeah on the one hand opening your code got you credit which was nice for the ego and for getting paid, and AI trains on it and doesn't give credit where it's due. But on the flip side, we get AI! Which I frikkin love. I feel like a kid in a candy store. It's training on my code too and it's training on my content. And when people ask about what the best product is for our space, the AI tells them its our product. Woohoo!
Regarding the future: We have some really really big problems that need solving - stuff that creates a massive amount of misery in dark stuffy hospital rooms with crying relatives saying goodbye to their 9 year old child. I've been in those spaces and I'd give up the previous generation of open source ethics in a heartbeat to make just an ounce of that misery stop. The training that my code provides AI is a tiny little part of that solution, and I'm proud of that. Whatever I can do to push our capabilities to the point where we can make the major breakthroughs this species needs, I'm happy to provide.
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
That is kind of net loss at this point. Hey, on the bright side we get onslaught of slop, ai psychosis, constant stream of doom trolling.
And ideology of pointlessness where any time you do or learn anything, you get told that why bother you should have used AI.
The kid forever locked in candy store is happy for a bit, but then they get hungry and feel bad. And no matter how much sugar you eat, it wont get better.
lisplist · · focus · HN ↗
From technological enthusiast perspective - if you can't find an endless stream of uses for this technology, I really don't know what to tell you anymore. I gave credence to AI naysayers for a while, but at this point I feel like its akin to denying gravity exists.
Who are we to gatekeep software development? So many people have gained the ability to interact with computers in ways they never dreamed of before! For me, I've never felt so engaged in software development, even if I'm no longer writing it line by line.
Like you say, there are a lot of negative externalities to this technology, but its something we're going to have to solve rather than dismissing it outright. The industrial revolution caused all sorts of problems! But you can't argue we're worse off because of it.
Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
Sure, artisanal code in itself isn't something inherently sellable but if you pride your program on being a quality product then it's still valuable for others:) AI is basically the new JavaScript in a way.It won't create the next Linux or the next SQLite by itself.
hombre_fatal · · focus · HN ↗
By this point, if you care about a quality product, you should learn how to leverage LLMs for that like running automated audits for correctness and performance opportunities.
There isn't a market for "yeah there's a memory leak but I wrote it by hand."
Pannoniae · · focus · HN ↗
Hand-written memory leaks don't have a market but hand-designed software with hand-designed UX and a hand-designed vision does :)
hombre_fatal · · focus · HN ↗
And Fable's architectural design is pretty much always well-reasoned and a good place to start.
There's this idea that the best way to use LLMs is to be in the backseat constantly yelling out corrections, but that hasn't been true in my experience for quite some time, though I only use a few sota models.
I think something being slop this late in the game is mainly a reflection of the person using it. I can't really blame AI anymore when pretty much any lever you'd recommend to de-slop it is one prompt away.
I agree with your last bit, and that is the only thing left now that AI solved the technical part.