At work we've got a number of initiatives vibe-coded by executives or product people who quickly shat out a proof-of-concept and then handed it off to real developers to build upon their...
At work we've got a number of initiatives vibe-coded by executives or product people who quickly shat out a proof-of-concept and then handed it off to real developers to build upon their "efforts". And these are alarmingly being fast-tracked into production for client usage. It's nothing critical, fortunately, but still.
AI enables the most toxic of executive (and product) traits -- I want something, I want it now, and I don't want to put the time/effort into doing it right.
AI is definitely very efficient at giving other people work. On average, I think AI has made me less productive, because the non-developers in the company are moving very fast, which is impressive...
AI is definitely very efficient at giving other people work. On average, I think AI has made me less productive, because the non-developers in the company are moving very fast, which is impressive in its own right and I understand their excitement as they get to automate internal processes that have normally been down-prioritized by the developers, because we need to focus on the customer facing product. However, their constant new ideas gives us more work for questions, new requests for data access, changes in existing internal tooling and several meetings with compliance on why we can't just give AI agents full access to our database and production system. All makes for less time to do actual development on our product.
You are describing the exact situation I am going through. My CEO direct has been handing off his slopications to us saying "it's basically all done". It is going as well as you imagine it is.
You are describing the exact situation I am going through. My CEO direct has been handing off his slopications to us saying "it's basically all done". It is going as well as you imagine it is.
We have a dedicated AI team specifically to curb this. The main thing the AI team does is provide a baseline of agent skills, subagents, etc that keep the AI itself on a sane path, forcing it to...
We have a dedicated AI team specifically to curb this.
The main thing the AI team does is provide a baseline of agent skills, subagents, etc that keep the AI itself on a sane path, forcing it to run deterministic code quality checks on everything as much as possible.
Not a perfect solution, but it did cut down on the complete bullshit slopfests quite a bit. Cleanup isn't easy but it's easier now that the vibed stuff is at least of average quality from the start.
I'm sorry for your lousy executives. Ours do stuff like that too, but also 100% accept that we'll just use his version as a prototype example and rewrite all of it. But we are an AI first company...
I'm sorry for your lousy executives. Ours do stuff like that too, but also 100% accept that we'll just use his version as a prototype example and rewrite all of it. But we are an AI first company anyway, so we probably have quite a bit more competence in the area than others.
Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by Miklós Koren, an economist at Central European University in Vienna, released a paper titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. [...] In experiments with six coding models, the researchers found that open-source software packages that were frequently recommended by models saw large increases in download numbers — but that activity did not translate into the engagement that typically sustains maintainers. The paper concludes that, “under the traditional business model, where developer revenue depends entirely on direct user engagement, the open-source ecosystem cannot survive widespread AI adoption”.
If everybody is using the same tools for writing code anyway, what is the value of collaboration, especially with those who don’t know their way around your project? In the past, a new contributor would gradually build knowledge about your project and hopefully one day become a trusted maintainer. But if they simply point a tool at it, there’s no reason to believe that accepting their contribution will lead to any growth in their knowledge of, or investment in, your project. And why should other developers, maintainers and potential employers assign any value to those contributions?
Comeau worries about a generation of developers whose coding education is supplanted by interactions with LLMs, which often try to solve problems directly and narrowly, rather than by providing broader context. “AIs will know how to answer the question that you have, but you don’t know what questions you should be asking that you’re not asking,” he said. The lack of a bigger-picture understanding “seems like a serious skill deficit that’s going to become a problem when the current generation of developers, who learnt before these tools existed, start to retire or move on”.
“Until very recently,” Rich Harris told me, “the idea that you would effectively pay rent to a Silicon Valley company for the privilege of being able to write software would have been considered completely absurd.”
“One of the beautiful things about software development is that it’s completely permissionless,” Harris said. “Anyone can do it, and the tools that we use to create software are themselves fully available open-source software. Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development.”
“In general, writing code the first time was never the problem for any project,” says cURL’s Stenberg. “The challenge for any project is maintaining it over time, fixing bugs over time. If you don’t understand it, you have to rely on the AI to fix all of the problems, going forward.”
He continued: “They are not that good at fixing the problems; they’re much better at finding the problems.”
Nearly 60 years ago, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles wrote an essay titled “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!”. She argued that the work of maintenance is often unappreciated and devalued — “a drag; it takes all the fucking time” — next to the more celebrated work of creation. “After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” asked Ukeles, who has served as the artist in residence for the New York City Department of Sanitation since 1977. She argued that society “confers lousy status” on those who do maintenance.
This is perhaps truer than ever in the era of the “creator economy” and tech industrialists who burn and build and move fast and break things. To the “creators” go wealth and prestige while the maintainers work in the background, scraping rust and justifying their existence to a society that takes them for granted.
Copying my post from another forum: My company is now doing a build vs. buy analysis on any new software purchases. Surprisingly, building/vibing our own solution wins out the vast majority of the...
Copying my post from another forum:
My company is now doing a build vs. buy analysis on any new software purchases. Surprisingly, building/vibing our own solution wins out the vast majority of the time. Why?
Cost is infinitely cheaper. Some of our tools cost around $0.15/month to run that would have cost $30,000/year. Part of this too is that many SaaS solutions we buy have features we don't use but they come bundled as part of a package. Or, maybe only 3-4 people need a specific tool to help them with work. Takes a few minutes with AI to get something spun up without having to go through sales calls, IT approvals, legal discussions, onboarding....the costs add up when you go through this process.
Data ownership. The more SaaS solutions you buy, the more your data becomes fragmented and relies on interoperability. We've started the process of mirroring and organizing our data across all of our software apps into BigQuery so we aren't relying on let's say a $700,000 database known as Salesforce.
Adaptability. If we need a new feature or automation added, we can turn around something quickly instead of waiting for our SaaS provider to add it to their roadmap. This is huge for us, because often we just want something small added or tweaked and we can do it on the fly.
Will there be issues. Hell yes. But there are issues with human-written code as well. And instead of having noticing a bug, contacting support, getting passed through customer success, having it go into their next coding sprint to fix, getting on a call with their support team to troubleshoot, waiting a month for the next update....we can have it fixed near instantly.
This also plays a huge part in AI governance. If we give everyone and their mother access to Claude/Codex/etc. then costs are going to spiral out of control. Every one who has access to these tools must be using them to accomplish a project. That makes it easy for the finance, security, and IT to manage and audit.
We've noticed the exact same cost thing in my company too. Specifically the "we pay 10k/month and use like three features" bit. Creating a bespoke tool for those exact three features ourselves...
We've noticed the exact same cost thing in my company too. Specifically the "we pay 10k/month and use like three features" bit.
Creating a bespoke tool for those exact three features ourselves costs less than the monthly fee AND we own the code so we can integrate it deeper into our processes and tools.
That's why the AI strategy makes no sense for any company except ones that run foundational models. If the "promise of AI" comes to fruition, then if you sell software as your primary business...
That's why the AI strategy makes no sense for any company except ones that run foundational models.
If the "promise of AI" comes to fruition, then if you sell software as your primary business model, your days are numbered.
The only way that isn't true is if AI is massively over hyped and not actually useful for developing software, and this possibility is becoming less and less true by the month.
How is it then a viable business strategy to sell software based on the premise that AI is as powerful as it's being made out to be?
If you make an AI tool, like an AI code editor, or an AI harness, or an AI developer tool chain, you are selling a product that based on it's very own pitch, is worth only the amount of tokens you spent to build it. Why would any company pay you, and your "developers" who apparently don't write any code, instead of just paying anthropic and making their own version that they have full control over?
Either the technology isn't as useful as you're making it out to be, in which case, the AI tools around them aren't that useful either, or it is useful, and your AI tools are worthless because anyone can easily replicate them.
Its a losing strategy from a logical basis, but somehow, these companies are still gaining investment.
I'm seeing this in the enterprise space too. We've been extremely conservative with ai usage. We only have sanctioned licenses for about 20 of our thousands of users, we're very rigorous with what...
I'm seeing this in the enterprise space too. We've been extremely conservative with ai usage. We only have sanctioned licenses for about 20 of our thousands of users, we're very rigorous with what we do and don't allow them to do, and we have regular communication and monitoring with them.
Even still, there's been a proliferation of hundreds of "agents". Most of them already forgotten and abandoned, but some of them becoming parts of business processes, and I have no doubt in my mind that as time goes on they'll become more and more critical to very important business processes. We have no good way of differentiating between the two, and no good long term plan for cleaning them up.
Its like the ever present shadow IT problem cranked up to 11 and injected with steroids. With traditional shadow IT, at least the outputs were generally deterministic. This stuff is a mess.
I've given presentations about this at work, just to inform people how stupid it is to make a 3rd party rented agent the engine of any product, tool or application. Some people get it, some don't....
I've given presentations about this at work, just to inform people how stupid it is to make a 3rd party rented agent the engine of any product, tool or application.
Some people get it, some don't. But that's what API budgets are for, just tighten the cost screw until some AI-centric process starts failing and fix them one by one. (Or rather have the creator fix it)
Of course I know him. He's me! I just got roped into another one of these. For business process automation it's amazing what a motivated manager can create. But it's messy and not secure and blah...
Of course I know him. He's me! I just got roped into another one of these. For business process automation it's amazing what a motivated manager can create. But it's messy and not secure and blah blah. But that don't matter. Before to get these good tools deployed an engineer would have to identify the problem and then know enough business case to prototype and get management buy-in. Now they buy themselves in and bring the experience in to fix the mess. It's actually better/faster for the business this way.
I imagine there will be more open source projects that rarely accept pull requests and ask for donations instead, because they’d rather use a coding agent themselves.
I imagine there will be more open source projects that rarely accept pull requests and ask for donations instead, because they’d rather use a coding agent themselves.
I think the article asking what's the point of open source at that point then? What will happen to critical projects when their maintainers retire and no one else has a good idea on how they work?...
I think the article asking what's the point of open source at that point then? What will happen to critical projects when their maintainers retire and no one else has a good idea on how they work?
Think of it this way, would Linux have become what it is today if only a selected few were allowed to contribute to it? In the age of AI, would something like Vue be possible, where its creator can make a living through Patreon, if AI recommends the more popular tools like React? And would Godot have built enough momentum to become an alternative worth considering?
I hope I'm not just being difficult, but I think I may have some perspective to add to this topic just based on being on the internet and engaging with Linux and open source as an end user for...
I hope I'm not just being difficult, but I think I may have some perspective to add to this topic just based on being on the internet and engaging with Linux and open source as an end user for almost 30 years now. I am concerned that we're conflating a bunch of different topics together, and pointing to these different "evolutions" of open source as no longer being possible in order to spell doom for it. Godot wasn't even open source for over a decade, but it probably gained popularity because it was free and open. Making a living through Patreon has only been something that happens for the last 10 years or so it's not inherent of "open source". Will it continue to be possible going forward? Your prediction there is as good as mine. We don't even know if entry level programmers will be able to make a living in 10 years at this point (but they probably will be able to). Linux in the early 90's really goes back to Richard Stallman and FSF ethos that software you run should have the code accessible by the end user, so you can make changes to it. I don't think that idea is ever going to go out of date. It's kind of like saying toll roads have made public roads obsolete.
Rather than going out of date, I think it's closer than it ever was to becoming real. From a practical point of view, an app being modifiable by its end user has not been true for most end users,...
Rather than going out of date, I think it's closer than it ever was to becoming real.
From a practical point of view, an app being modifiable by its end user has not been true for most end users, who wouldn't know how to change and rebuild the software anyway.
You can say, oh, but they can get someone else to do it, but hiring programmers is very expensive and out of reach for most people.
So instead people file bugs and feature requests, and hope.
Now with coding agents, you have a chance. When creating a new VM on exe.dev, you can give it a prompt and tell it to install some open source software for you. While using it, if you notice a bug or want something to work differently, you can ask it to fix it. It's quite an empowering way to do self-hosting. (I mean, self-hosted other than relying on exe.dev.)
Of course exe.dev is a rather obscure and geeky service that most people won't use. But this seems promising! It makes FSF's theoretical justification from way back then real, or closer to real anyway.
This all relies on open source though. You can empower end users, but they mostly won't know who you are, let alone pay you. You have to do it for the love of the game or something like that. (Or influencers can do influencing.)
Open source licensing isn’t going away, and it’s independent of the community and fund-raising aspects of it. There are multiple ways to maintain open source code that people can mix and match....
Open source licensing isn’t going away, and it’s independent of the community and fund-raising aspects of it. There are multiple ways to maintain open source code that people can mix and match.
One is to “throw it over the wall” and not maintain it, as researchers sometimes do when they wrote the code in support of writing a paper. After the paper is done, they publish the paper and the code and move on to something else. Or they might reuse the code by modifying it in support of another paper.
Another approach is corporate sponsorship. There are open source projects that are well-supported by tech companies for various reasons. The Go and TypeScript languages come to mind. They don’t monetize it directly but it’s software that they use to build other products. Both Redis and Valkey get financial support from companies, with somewhat different approaches.
Another approach that might work better now that coding agents are a thing is crowdfunding. Writers and artists often do that. They’re making what they want to make. Musicians aren’t asking strangers to edit their work, but you can donate to their Patreon and they might pay attention to what fans like. Zig seems to be supported by crowdfunding. It works if you can get people’s attention.
The decentralized model with contributors coming from all over and core contributors deciding what to merge is common, but it’s only one way to do it and there are others.
So, my guess is that there will be an adjustment period as people figure out new approaches that work for them. Or not. Less popular open source software usually ends up being abandoned.
Marijn Haverbeke, creator of CodeMirror and ProseMirror (two rather fundamental libraries for code and rich text editing on the web) just announced that for Wordgard, his successor to ProseMirror,...
Marijn Haverbeke, creator of CodeMirror and ProseMirror (two rather fundamental libraries for code and rich text editing on the web) just announced that for Wordgard, his successor to ProseMirror, he won't be accepting community contributions specifically to avoid coding agents.
That comment gave me an epiphany. I recently received a 1.400 (!) lines PR for a project, totally vibe-coded. Maybe it works, I don't know, I don't even want to pull the branch. At that point I'd...
That comment gave me an epiphany. I recently received a 1.400 (!) lines PR for a project, totally vibe-coded. Maybe it works, I don't know, I don't even want to pull the branch.
At that point I'd rather vibe-code it myself again. At least I would understand what's happening.
Years ago I did agency web development work and we started to see the rise of wix and all these other WYSIWYG website builders. At first it seemed like a threat, but then we started to get new...
Years ago I did agency web development work and we started to see the rise of wix and all these other WYSIWYG website builders. At first it seemed like a threat, but then we started to get new clients who had gone that route, hit the limit of their own capabilities, and came to us to build something custom.
So I'm hoping this ends like that. Where there's just a ton of work for developers when this inevitably crashes, stalls, or prices itself out of viability.
I did that as well at the time, though free lance as a side job, and the rise of Wix/Wordpress/etc made me stop doing it. The reason was that so many of the potential clients had come to the...
I did that as well at the time, though free lance as a side job, and the rise of Wix/Wordpress/etc made me stop doing it. The reason was that so many of the potential clients had come to the conclusion that web development was now trivial because they had already done so much with Wix or equivalent and they expected extremely quick results for very little compensation. I am feeling the same vibe (no pun intended) with the AI built prototypes. I don't enjoy needing to be the bad guy, but it has become part of my role to directly point out how trivial some of the "applications" we're handed are and that a real application will require a great deal more work. I do think that these can work really well as prototypes to show off ideas and intent, so there is definitely value there, but nothing that has been handled off by an executive has been correct or anywhere approaching something we'd keep and maintain.
I’ve heard a similar sentiment from carpenters — the incredibly low price and high availability of IKEA furniture has distorted people’s perceptions of how much they expect custom furniture to...
come to the conclusion that web development was now trivial because they had already done so much with Wix or equivalent and they expected extremely quick results for very little compensation
I’ve heard a similar sentiment from carpenters — the incredibly low price and high availability of IKEA furniture has distorted people’s perceptions of how much they expect custom furniture to cost, for example upgrading a spare room with a Murphy bed and thinking that tailoring the construction to the size/shape of the room wouldn’t be all that much more than buying a prebuilt.
I think the way to manage expectations like that is just to be upfront and transparent about costs (where possible) so that people can make an informed choice before jumping in with inaccurate expectations.
That's almost certainly a good approach, but as it was side work in addition to my full time work and long commute, I just decided to not burn myself out.
That's almost certainly a good approach, but as it was side work in addition to my full time work and long commute, I just decided to not burn myself out.
At work we've got a number of initiatives vibe-coded by executives or product people who quickly shat out a proof-of-concept and then handed it off to real developers to build upon their "efforts". And these are alarmingly being fast-tracked into production for client usage. It's nothing critical, fortunately, but still.
AI enables the most toxic of executive (and product) traits -- I want something, I want it now, and I don't want to put the time/effort into doing it right.
AI is definitely very efficient at giving other people work. On average, I think AI has made me less productive, because the non-developers in the company are moving very fast, which is impressive in its own right and I understand their excitement as they get to automate internal processes that have normally been down-prioritized by the developers, because we need to focus on the customer facing product. However, their constant new ideas gives us more work for questions, new requests for data access, changes in existing internal tooling and several meetings with compliance on why we can't just give AI agents full access to our database and production system. All makes for less time to do actual development on our product.
You are describing the exact situation I am going through. My CEO direct has been handing off his slopications to us saying "it's basically all done". It is going as well as you imagine it is.
We have a dedicated AI team specifically to curb this.
The main thing the AI team does is provide a baseline of agent skills, subagents, etc that keep the AI itself on a sane path, forcing it to run deterministic code quality checks on everything as much as possible.
Not a perfect solution, but it did cut down on the complete bullshit slopfests quite a bit. Cleanup isn't easy but it's easier now that the vibed stuff is at least of average quality from the start.
I'm sorry for your lousy executives. Ours do stuff like that too, but also 100% accept that we'll just use his version as a prototype example and rewrite all of it. But we are an AI first company anyway, so we probably have quite a bit more competence in the area than others.
Sounds like they need to hire more software engineers!
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Copying my post from another forum:
My company is now doing a build vs. buy analysis on any new software purchases. Surprisingly, building/vibing our own solution wins out the vast majority of the time. Why?
Cost is infinitely cheaper. Some of our tools cost around $0.15/month to run that would have cost $30,000/year. Part of this too is that many SaaS solutions we buy have features we don't use but they come bundled as part of a package. Or, maybe only 3-4 people need a specific tool to help them with work. Takes a few minutes with AI to get something spun up without having to go through sales calls, IT approvals, legal discussions, onboarding....the costs add up when you go through this process.
Data ownership. The more SaaS solutions you buy, the more your data becomes fragmented and relies on interoperability. We've started the process of mirroring and organizing our data across all of our software apps into BigQuery so we aren't relying on let's say a $700,000 database known as Salesforce.
Adaptability. If we need a new feature or automation added, we can turn around something quickly instead of waiting for our SaaS provider to add it to their roadmap. This is huge for us, because often we just want something small added or tweaked and we can do it on the fly.
Will there be issues. Hell yes. But there are issues with human-written code as well. And instead of having noticing a bug, contacting support, getting passed through customer success, having it go into their next coding sprint to fix, getting on a call with their support team to troubleshoot, waiting a month for the next update....we can have it fixed near instantly.
This also plays a huge part in AI governance. If we give everyone and their mother access to Claude/Codex/etc. then costs are going to spiral out of control. Every one who has access to these tools must be using them to accomplish a project. That makes it easy for the finance, security, and IT to manage and audit.
We've noticed the exact same cost thing in my company too. Specifically the "we pay 10k/month and use like three features" bit.
Creating a bespoke tool for those exact three features ourselves costs less than the monthly fee AND we own the code so we can integrate it deeper into our processes and tools.
That's why the AI strategy makes no sense for any company except ones that run foundational models.
If the "promise of AI" comes to fruition, then if you sell software as your primary business model, your days are numbered.
The only way that isn't true is if AI is massively over hyped and not actually useful for developing software, and this possibility is becoming less and less true by the month.
How is it then a viable business strategy to sell software based on the premise that AI is as powerful as it's being made out to be?
If you make an AI tool, like an AI code editor, or an AI harness, or an AI developer tool chain, you are selling a product that based on it's very own pitch, is worth only the amount of tokens you spent to build it. Why would any company pay you, and your "developers" who apparently don't write any code, instead of just paying anthropic and making their own version that they have full control over?
Either the technology isn't as useful as you're making it out to be, in which case, the AI tools around them aren't that useful either, or it is useful, and your AI tools are worthless because anyone can easily replicate them.
Its a losing strategy from a logical basis, but somehow, these companies are still gaining investment.
I'm seeing this in the enterprise space too. We've been extremely conservative with ai usage. We only have sanctioned licenses for about 20 of our thousands of users, we're very rigorous with what we do and don't allow them to do, and we have regular communication and monitoring with them.
Even still, there's been a proliferation of hundreds of "agents". Most of them already forgotten and abandoned, but some of them becoming parts of business processes, and I have no doubt in my mind that as time goes on they'll become more and more critical to very important business processes. We have no good way of differentiating between the two, and no good long term plan for cleaning them up.
Its like the ever present shadow IT problem cranked up to 11 and injected with steroids. With traditional shadow IT, at least the outputs were generally deterministic. This stuff is a mess.
I've given presentations about this at work, just to inform people how stupid it is to make a 3rd party rented agent the engine of any product, tool or application.
Some people get it, some don't. But that's what API budgets are for, just tighten the cost screw until some AI-centric process starts failing and fix them one by one. (Or rather have the creator fix it)
Of course I know him. He's me! I just got roped into another one of these. For business process automation it's amazing what a motivated manager can create. But it's messy and not secure and blah blah. But that don't matter. Before to get these good tools deployed an engineer would have to identify the problem and then know enough business case to prototype and get management buy-in. Now they buy themselves in and bring the experience in to fix the mess. It's actually better/faster for the business this way.
I imagine there will be more open source projects that rarely accept pull requests and ask for donations instead, because they’d rather use a coding agent themselves.
I think the article asking what's the point of open source at that point then? What will happen to critical projects when their maintainers retire and no one else has a good idea on how they work?
Think of it this way, would Linux have become what it is today if only a selected few were allowed to contribute to it? In the age of AI, would something like Vue be possible, where its creator can make a living through Patreon, if AI recommends the more popular tools like React? And would Godot have built enough momentum to become an alternative worth considering?
I hope I'm not just being difficult, but I think I may have some perspective to add to this topic just based on being on the internet and engaging with Linux and open source as an end user for almost 30 years now. I am concerned that we're conflating a bunch of different topics together, and pointing to these different "evolutions" of open source as no longer being possible in order to spell doom for it. Godot wasn't even open source for over a decade, but it probably gained popularity because it was free and open. Making a living through Patreon has only been something that happens for the last 10 years or so it's not inherent of "open source". Will it continue to be possible going forward? Your prediction there is as good as mine. We don't even know if entry level programmers will be able to make a living in 10 years at this point (but they probably will be able to). Linux in the early 90's really goes back to Richard Stallman and FSF ethos that software you run should have the code accessible by the end user, so you can make changes to it. I don't think that idea is ever going to go out of date. It's kind of like saying toll roads have made public roads obsolete.
Rather than going out of date, I think it's closer than it ever was to becoming real.
From a practical point of view, an app being modifiable by its end user has not been true for most end users, who wouldn't know how to change and rebuild the software anyway.
You can say, oh, but they can get someone else to do it, but hiring programmers is very expensive and out of reach for most people.
So instead people file bugs and feature requests, and hope.
Now with coding agents, you have a chance. When creating a new VM on exe.dev, you can give it a prompt and tell it to install some open source software for you. While using it, if you notice a bug or want something to work differently, you can ask it to fix it. It's quite an empowering way to do self-hosting. (I mean, self-hosted other than relying on exe.dev.)
Of course exe.dev is a rather obscure and geeky service that most people won't use. But this seems promising! It makes FSF's theoretical justification from way back then real, or closer to real anyway.
This all relies on open source though. You can empower end users, but they mostly won't know who you are, let alone pay you. You have to do it for the love of the game or something like that. (Or influencers can do influencing.)
Open source licensing isn’t going away, and it’s independent of the community and fund-raising aspects of it. There are multiple ways to maintain open source code that people can mix and match.
One is to “throw it over the wall” and not maintain it, as researchers sometimes do when they wrote the code in support of writing a paper. After the paper is done, they publish the paper and the code and move on to something else. Or they might reuse the code by modifying it in support of another paper.
Another approach is corporate sponsorship. There are open source projects that are well-supported by tech companies for various reasons. The Go and TypeScript languages come to mind. They don’t monetize it directly but it’s software that they use to build other products. Both Redis and Valkey get financial support from companies, with somewhat different approaches.
Another approach that might work better now that coding agents are a thing is crowdfunding. Writers and artists often do that. They’re making what they want to make. Musicians aren’t asking strangers to edit their work, but you can donate to their Patreon and they might pay attention to what fans like. Zig seems to be supported by crowdfunding. It works if you can get people’s attention.
The decentralized model with contributors coming from all over and core contributors deciding what to merge is common, but it’s only one way to do it and there are others.
So, my guess is that there will be an adjustment period as people figure out new approaches that work for them. Or not. Less popular open source software usually ends up being abandoned.
Marijn Haverbeke, creator of CodeMirror and ProseMirror (two rather fundamental libraries for code and rich text editing on the web) just announced that for Wordgard, his successor to ProseMirror, he won't be accepting community contributions specifically to avoid coding agents.
That comment gave me an epiphany. I recently received a 1.400 (!) lines PR for a project, totally vibe-coded. Maybe it works, I don't know, I don't even want to pull the branch.
At that point I'd rather vibe-code it myself again. At least I would understand what's happening.
I call "Not it!".
Just kidding, I'll definitely be one of the cleaners.
Years ago I did agency web development work and we started to see the rise of wix and all these other WYSIWYG website builders. At first it seemed like a threat, but then we started to get new clients who had gone that route, hit the limit of their own capabilities, and came to us to build something custom.
So I'm hoping this ends like that. Where there's just a ton of work for developers when this inevitably crashes, stalls, or prices itself out of viability.
I did that as well at the time, though free lance as a side job, and the rise of Wix/Wordpress/etc made me stop doing it. The reason was that so many of the potential clients had come to the conclusion that web development was now trivial because they had already done so much with Wix or equivalent and they expected extremely quick results for very little compensation. I am feeling the same vibe (no pun intended) with the AI built prototypes. I don't enjoy needing to be the bad guy, but it has become part of my role to directly point out how trivial some of the "applications" we're handed are and that a real application will require a great deal more work. I do think that these can work really well as prototypes to show off ideas and intent, so there is definitely value there, but nothing that has been handled off by an executive has been correct or anywhere approaching something we'd keep and maintain.
I’ve heard a similar sentiment from carpenters — the incredibly low price and high availability of IKEA furniture has distorted people’s perceptions of how much they expect custom furniture to cost, for example upgrading a spare room with a Murphy bed and thinking that tailoring the construction to the size/shape of the room wouldn’t be all that much more than buying a prebuilt.
I think the way to manage expectations like that is just to be upfront and transparent about costs (where possible) so that people can make an informed choice before jumping in with inaccurate expectations.
That's almost certainly a good approach, but as it was side work in addition to my full time work and long commute, I just decided to not burn myself out.
Yeah, that’s certainly a sensible approach, and one I’d probably take myself if I was in the same situation