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Maybe I've got rose-colored glasses but I love open source too much to believe it will not survive this AI wave. There's just something too profound about putting an idea out there and having people instantly build on top of it. I refuse to believe that will lose value or go away.

I've seen two arguments: (1) With code being so cheap to produce, people will recreate things instead of building on top of community infrastructure. (2) High volume of slop AI PRs cause OSS to be more locked down as far as who can contribute and cause ecosystem breakdown that way.

I’m not worried about (1) for projects with ecosystems. Small libraries and apps may be affected. (2) does worry me. We’ll likely go through the same cycle schools face with LLM cheating. There’ll be a way to measure where a PR sits on the human–vibe-coded scale, and maintainers will set their bar.

WRT to (1) do you think we might end up in a place where only the current big whales survive and there's no way for new communities to emerge and grow?

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The bar will get higher for bootstrappers. What moat do you have that won't crumble against advanced LLMs? Clear examples I see are OSS libs with hosted services option (Vercel for Next.js, etc.) another one is pedigree of the maintainers.