Post

I've found the OSS scene to be super depressing lately. Quite a few individuals that I've respected for years due to the care, quality, and thoughtfulness put into their work have done this strange flip where they've entirely abandoned that, switching to a model of just throwing shit out the door.

Their past work is still out there and is still proof of hundreds of hours of work, so what happened? Has the proliferation of AI eroded the way some people think about software? Devaluing their work to a corporate-like "whatever it takes to get it out the door, do it" mentality? It's super odd.

OSS was great specifically because it was a space in which many devs could invest time & effort at their own pace. Releases were when we were happy with it, you could put in a level of care that wouldn't fly at a day job. How you got to a result could matter just as much as the result itself.

And of course, the social aspect is totally dead too. No, I don't want to get home after a long day of work and review PRs from AI agents that scanned the codebase and imagined (rarely actually found) a few possible bugs. That's absolutely miserable and soulless.

I sympathise a lot with this and I myself have also been increasingly using AI to get stuff done that has been stuck in my brain. I'd like to belief that I'm not throwing out random shit but I'll leave that to others to decide.

One of the issues is that collaborative tinkering is dead, I still think of those times where someone would create something neat and we would not copy it 100 times just for fun. An OSS test suite is now a set of guardrails for someones agent, it's demoralising to put out OSS nowadays.