I could not imagine the pain being being the head of a Libre/Open project nowadays.
It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.
Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.
It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
> Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
Why not? I've been at workplaces where a PR needed to be less than X lines of code without approval from some skip level contributor vouching for it. It's usually an absurdly high limit that you'd realistically never hit in a legacy codebase, but maybe that limit would work fine to filter out massive vibecode PRs.
The goal wasn't to add bureaucracy, but to stop this precise problem: stopping a potentially rushed engineer from pushing in a massive change without oversight. Even large, quality PRs can cause all kinds of long term maintenance issues down the line, so I have no clue why vibecode is getting such grace.
There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.
Right, I feel like this is more of the forcing function here rather than generic spam. Open source used to work because operational code was expensive, and it made sense to share. Now, operational code is dirt cheap. Furthermore, you can customize anything to your hearts content now with zero additional effort, so it’s more desirable to make your own solution.
I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.
I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.
I do dislike the fact that they nowadays use Discord though, there are better alternatives like fluxer.gg available, though I do understand that most/some people are already on discord and it has become more normal to create a discord server than other alternatives if one wants to which requires having members
which is much easier on discord.
As compared to the friction of another app even though they might be really great, I highly recommend trying out fluxer)
Then also if the developer has already created a discord server, then its hard to slightly migrate the existing users on their discord.
But I am sad about this development though, the community of open source or communities in general moving to discord does feel like moving to a walled garden (one which has increasingly more issues like trying to auto-detect your age and then asking for age-verification and plethora of other issues that a user is exposed to just by using the app which they might be using for the community itself, I really dislike it and I do wish if forums or something better could be used more as compared to discord.)
[Side-note: I built https://mirror.forum which is intended for communities to have both discord/fluxer & also other discord alternatives like stoat/matrix links to eventually help migrate users to these platforms and to help in finding the communities present in these spaces in the first place, I would love some feedback as the website is mostly crickets to be honest]
Fluxer.gg is really good and in my opinion, tries to be the most similar alternative to discord in terms of UI/UX so it should "just work"
I highly highly recommend you checking it out, I must say that the first time I used it, I was mind blown that this open source discord alternative actually feels so usable in day-to-day lives.
There are many alternatives to be honest, stoat, matrix,fluxer but fluxer is the alternative I would recommend for public spaces.
The issue now is I think mostly just moving the userbase over to there.
[I have talked to the dev and tried to share it a few times on hackernews as a submission to help get more userbase as I think that HN would definitely love fluxer if it came to know more about it]
(Very slight advertisement but I have tried to build something in this space at https://mirror.forum which can allow a community to have discord,fluxer,matrix,stoat links in the same place for the purposes of discovery of servers in other places than discord and also for the migration of the userbase itself as i think that the problem of an open source solution is mostly solved and this was my attempt at trying to partially help in fixing the moving the userbase issue and making people more familiar with alternatives, though the website mostly has no activity nowadays and I would love activity to happen but I am unsure how to realistically approach so... that's why I am advertising perhaps, I would love to get feedback as well :-D)
Part of me is wondering, maybe it’s time for part of open source to move from code to just words or prose? Since it’s possible to use AI to fix bugs and add features arguably more easily than before, what we could share with each other are ideas, thoughts, additions to each other’s prompts or skills that could be reviewed by the community.
And in this case carefully crafted, clear, and expressive words that are not too verbose would be the contributions of tomorrow.
I keep going back to LLM Wiki. It has found itself in so many other skills because of its fundamental value. Maybe we don’t have as many pull requests. But that one skill has proliferated in so many other skills because of its value.
Ah, is it September[0] again already? Yes, our fun little clubs get popular, and the posers move in, and they're cheating or, well, they're not really cheating per se, but they're just no fun to play with, and they seem to be having fun without us, so we're going to take our ball and go home.
I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.
We just banned gen-AI PRs, it seems to be working so far.
Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.
OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.
Ahh yes, the fix is to regress to mailing lists...
They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.
This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.
I don't have a strong preference of the medium (heck, I'm biased against centralize communication channels driven by a for-profit company). It's more about the act of needing to participate in a community to vouch that you're there in good faith.
There was a time before programming, hacking, open source, and related communities. These things did not exist even 60 years ago. There will be a time after them, and we’ll move on to something else.
Right, the article does seem very, uh, doomery. The author has prematurely spelled the end of open source when we've hardly had time to contend with this.
It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.
While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.
One has to hope that this is mostly just the "uncanny valley" of AI as it climbs up the ladder of general intelligence.
At some point I think AI technology available to us will be advanced enough that "slop" is largely a thing of the past. Some of the issues here will still remain, but hopefully at that point a PR review could be largely automated, in a trustworthy way.
> It was the people. It was fixing a typo in a README and having someone say thanks. It was a stranger on the other side of the world finding a bug in my code and sending a fix before I'd even woken up.
All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.
You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.
It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.
I personally find it better than ever, even with the current issues outlined in the post. We'll work through them, the linux kernel team has, the rest of us can too. But never has been easier to work on or hack up unfamiliar projects to learn from, build on, and extend. Many projects have more refined features with fewer bugs. It's not all bad stuff happening.
open source as the name suggests has never been unambiguously about open contribution. It's the code that's open, not the automatically the community that builds it. SQLite is sometimes brought up for its idiosyncratic developer code of conduct. Openness especially of very popular software with high reliability requirements has usually been on the user side.
I'm not too surprised by the recent problems but I see them as intensifications, not a new problem. As development platforms became larger, low quality contributors and people who wanted something on their CV became more and more common. That there's never been any kind of trust system makes these issues inevitable.
[delayed]
I could not imagine the pain being being the head of a Libre/Open project nowadays.
It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.
Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.
It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
> Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
Why not? It works for Dusk OS!
> Don't do that, but you get the idea.
Why not? I've been at workplaces where a PR needed to be less than X lines of code without approval from some skip level contributor vouching for it. It's usually an absurdly high limit that you'd realistically never hit in a legacy codebase, but maybe that limit would work fine to filter out massive vibecode PRs.
The goal wasn't to add bureaucracy, but to stop this precise problem: stopping a potentially rushed engineer from pushing in a massive change without oversight. Even large, quality PRs can cause all kinds of long term maintenance issues down the line, so I have no clue why vibecode is getting such grace.
There is also the fact that Maintainers simply don't need contributions any more. This I've noticed also happens at work. Everyone is maintaining their own mini stacks of things. Contribution is up cooperation is down. Why go talk to a colleague when you can talk to Claude? Change is everywhere.
Right, I feel like this is more of the forcing function here rather than generic spam. Open source used to work because operational code was expensive, and it made sense to share. Now, operational code is dirt cheap. Furthermore, you can customize anything to your hearts content now with zero additional effort, so it’s more desirable to make your own solution.
I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.
I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.
Goodhart's Law. If community participation becomes a hard requirement we'll see AI agents swamp them too.
Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/
Realistically, a lot of projects simply have a Discord now. If you want to contribute, you have to go participate in that first.
I do dislike the fact that they nowadays use Discord though, there are better alternatives like fluxer.gg available, though I do understand that most/some people are already on discord and it has become more normal to create a discord server than other alternatives if one wants to which requires having members which is much easier on discord.
As compared to the friction of another app even though they might be really great, I highly recommend trying out fluxer)
Then also if the developer has already created a discord server, then its hard to slightly migrate the existing users on their discord.
But I am sad about this development though, the community of open source or communities in general moving to discord does feel like moving to a walled garden (one which has increasingly more issues like trying to auto-detect your age and then asking for age-verification and plethora of other issues that a user is exposed to just by using the app which they might be using for the community itself, I really dislike it and I do wish if forums or something better could be used more as compared to discord.)
[Side-note: I built https://mirror.forum which is intended for communities to have both discord/fluxer & also other discord alternatives like stoat/matrix links to eventually help migrate users to these platforms and to help in finding the communities present in these spaces in the first place, I would love some feedback as the website is mostly crickets to be honest]
Speaking of everyone setting up their own stack, when's someone gonna do the thing and make self-hosting a Discord clone popular?
There exist several clones, but they all have some drawbacks. Unfortunately few people are willing to tolerate them.
Fluxer.gg is really good and in my opinion, tries to be the most similar alternative to discord in terms of UI/UX so it should "just work"
I highly highly recommend you checking it out, I must say that the first time I used it, I was mind blown that this open source discord alternative actually feels so usable in day-to-day lives.
There are many alternatives to be honest, stoat, matrix,fluxer but fluxer is the alternative I would recommend for public spaces.
The issue now is I think mostly just moving the userbase over to there.
[I have talked to the dev and tried to share it a few times on hackernews as a submission to help get more userbase as I think that HN would definitely love fluxer if it came to know more about it]
(Very slight advertisement but I have tried to build something in this space at https://mirror.forum which can allow a community to have discord,fluxer,matrix,stoat links in the same place for the purposes of discovery of servers in other places than discord and also for the migration of the userbase itself as i think that the problem of an open source solution is mostly solved and this was my attempt at trying to partially help in fixing the moving the userbase issue and making people more familiar with alternatives, though the website mostly has no activity nowadays and I would love activity to happen but I am unsure how to realistically approach so... that's why I am advertising perhaps, I would love to get feedback as well :-D)
Discords have been popping up all over too.
This doesn't sound like a barrier to bots
Part of me is wondering, maybe it’s time for part of open source to move from code to just words or prose? Since it’s possible to use AI to fix bugs and add features arguably more easily than before, what we could share with each other are ideas, thoughts, additions to each other’s prompts or skills that could be reviewed by the community.
And in this case carefully crafted, clear, and expressive words that are not too verbose would be the contributions of tomorrow.
I keep going back to LLM Wiki. It has found itself in so many other skills because of its fundamental value. Maybe we don’t have as many pull requests. But that one skill has proliferated in so many other skills because of its value.
The internet is now a token cache, and we reap those tokens into agents, ethics be damned.
Ah, is it September[0] again already? Yes, our fun little clubs get popular, and the posers move in, and they're cheating or, well, they're not really cheating per se, but they're just no fun to play with, and they seem to be having fun without us, so we're going to take our ball and go home.
I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.
Or is it the other way around?
Doula your grief.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
1. https://www.viruscomix.com/page583.html
We just banned gen-AI PRs, it seems to be working so far.
Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.
OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.
this could be siloed into complaints about github and pr workflows moreso than being related to FOSS. zero mention of mailing lists or patches, lol
Ahh yes, the fix is to regress to mailing lists...
They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.
This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.
Discord is just as bad imo, bring forums back
I don't have a strong preference of the medium (heck, I'm biased against centralize communication channels driven by a for-profit company). It's more about the act of needing to participate in a community to vouch that you're there in good faith.
different people like different modalities, each project already chooses their own, often several, because they serve different purposes and members
There was a time before programming, hacking, open source, and related communities. These things did not exist even 60 years ago. There will be a time after them, and we’ll move on to something else.
Yeah, the people aspect is dead or dying. I was having fun over the past few months, putting some AI assisted things I'd always wanted into the world.
Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.
It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.
> I don't know what the fix is
You said it was dead. How could there be any fix?
Right, the article does seem very, uh, doomery. The author has prematurely spelled the end of open source when we've hardly had time to contend with this.
It sounds like part of the problem is that AI tools are machine generated content acting like humans in a comment forum designed for humans. GitHub already has a variety of CI tools which generate huge volumes of machine generated text, and that text is appropriately buries for those that want it without spewing all of it in a developer’s discussion forum.
While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.
One has to hope that this is mostly just the "uncanny valley" of AI as it climbs up the ladder of general intelligence.
At some point I think AI technology available to us will be advanced enough that "slop" is largely a thing of the past. Some of the issues here will still remain, but hopefully at that point a PR review could be largely automated, in a trustworthy way.
> It was the people. It was fixing a typo in a README and having someone say thanks. It was a stranger on the other side of the world finding a bug in my code and sending a fix before I'd even woken up.
All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.
You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.
It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.
I personally find it better than ever, even with the current issues outlined in the post. We'll work through them, the linux kernel team has, the rest of us can too. But never has been easier to work on or hack up unfamiliar projects to learn from, build on, and extend. Many projects have more refined features with fewer bugs. It's not all bad stuff happening.
open source as the name suggests has never been unambiguously about open contribution. It's the code that's open, not the automatically the community that builds it. SQLite is sometimes brought up for its idiosyncratic developer code of conduct. Openness especially of very popular software with high reliability requirements has usually been on the user side.
I'm not too surprised by the recent problems but I see them as intensifications, not a new problem. As development platforms became larger, low quality contributors and people who wanted something on their CV became more and more common. That there's never been any kind of trust system makes these issues inevitable.
Well written & relatable.
At first i thought it was going to be a pure counter-AI rant, but no, the author admits using AI everyday in a variety of ways.
Another argument, maybe OSS of smaller packages is on its way out as we get to generate whatever is needed on the fly?