‘If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?’

According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don’t fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Archive: http://archive.today/sgl5M

  • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    3 days ago

    GitHub should have insight on new repositories and repositories that are gaining files like CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md that kind of tip off the use of AI coding.

    My guess is there’s a super long tail of projects people are releasing as open source that were vibe coded to solve some simple problem. Most will likely fall into abandonment or never reach any amount of viability.

    On the other hand the cost of starting a project to solve an interesting problem has never been lower. It’s never been easier to take a swing at building something cool that people might like. This should expose new opportunities that haven’t been attempted yet.

    My intuition says it’s not all bad. It’s like selling hammers to people who aren’t licensed construction workers. Yeah, some stuff will get built that should not be built.

    • Liketearsinrain@lemmy.ml
      1·
      2 days ago

      You can search for specific files across all of GitHub and see some stats. It is pretty bad, and it has become a semi-regular occurrence for someone to drop extremely large PRs on any mildly popular project, even on niche fields/languages.