Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

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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.