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Not to excuse the guy but there's a clear pattern of "solo( open source maintainer turns to genAI to do more things faster bc it's seen as the only way to do so" that ought to be addressed one day. If open-source devs had a real support system this wouldnt happen so much I think.

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Idk PPSSPP enough and maybe this isn't the case and maybe the guy has a wealthy Patreon or whatever but that specific set of circumstances plays out in many other projects so I think it touches at a weakness in the way Systems (don't) support open source devs right now and it's a shame.

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That said I can't think of, like, "external pressures" that would seemingly force the dev of a PSP emulator to do always more faster so there's probably some hubris going on. Nobody is going to be upset if you take months to ship an update to PPSSPP, brother.

Something something maybe if we had the systems in place for people to Do Shit without having to worry about "will it ever make a return" we wouldn't see so many hobbyist communities run to AI as the tech equivalent of a get-rich-quick-scheme.

But also I think there's a huge part of "well I want the clout of having youtubers talk about my cool recomp/emulator project so I'm gonna ask Claude to do it instead of learning myself" going on which is its own can of worms. "Doing it for the love of the game(in both senses)" is dying out.

Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of this... I think for a lot of people there’s a picture of personal pride but also a feeling of responsibility, and not feeling like it’s possible to step back. In this post-Jia Tan world I also think a lot of projects feel trapped unable to take new maintainers, too.

And the pride angle is I think where a project wouldn’t feel like they could pay another person even a token amount to help, but do feel comfortable paying for an LLM to do the same work. Because in the latter case it’s still β€œyour work”.

It's kind of wild the disparity you see with collective open-source funding, especially once you get outside something media-adjacent like game and emulator projects. Github sponsors and things like it are kind of a joke, so you end up dependent on corporate backing, which is a different problem

I suspect that even game/emulator stuff only see significant collective funding if it's, like, mainstream stuff *and* there's a carrot like "get new builds before everyone else!" like how CEMU had a lot of funding during the Wii U's lifespan and all that.

Yeah, and I think that also has similar dynamics to the stuff you see with other types of Patreon stuff. Early/bonus episodes of podcasts or videos, long tails of creators with, like, <$5 a month, etc. I think that dynamic disappears with the "boring but useful tools you use everyday" stuff