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.

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.

I understand and empathize with maintainers that feel demoralized at this point. No one seems to “care” anymore. Somehow AI seems to have made expertise or effort worthless (at least to the public perception).

Who cares if I spent hundreds of hours refining the APIs and docs for an NPM package if AI can “create” something almost as good in a few minutes

I suppose because OSS has always been seen as a bit worthless to the public ("but how do you sell this?", etc), I'm a bit less bothered by the behaviors of them (theft, slop, general race to the bottom) than I am maintainers seeing it as worthless. Undermines a lot of great work, past and present.

By all means, it's a "me issue", but I suppose I've internally defined OSS as care & effort, so without that, I don't see much point? If it's not a good product, not fulfilling for anyone involved, no one's profiting off of it, and it's a huge time sink -- what's the point? /disappointed rant over

This is the time when communities are more important than ever. Once you cut through the noise, many of us are still here collaborating, hacking away at ideas together, hanging out, etc. Filtering is a skill we all need to perfect. Discarding the distractions so we're only left with people & fun