I would say the bigger worry should be for "non open source". Where I work we buy so much "vendor crap" because they enter through one area of expertise (eg CRM) and upsell into a bunch of other crap they have no expertise in but purely via acquisitions they have done - I am talking about an imaginary vendor that rhymes with "DalesPorce". We have even demonstrated we are able to replicate their meagre (but highly marketed) offerings with our own high quality alternatives with much less cruft by using AI and a combination of OSS (especially by improving the OSS in the process).

The usual argument goes "oh but now you have to maintain it". Guess what - we have dedicated "DalesPorce" engineering teams just to maintain the expensive and buggy/unreliable DalesPorce setups - completely negating the so called "you can be fully hands off" value they promise. Even worse when we measure productivity of these dev teams - Teams on the DalesPorce stacks are 1/5th to 1/20th as productive as teams on the boring old stacks.

My 2c is that this is a great opportunity for OSS. Instead of just building basic early stage offerings they should help help companies embrace the "commodotize the complement" strategy. Not just for the main offering but also in offering uber easy to setup and manage control plane services over them.

It seems like the opportunity is for open source to explode thanks to AI. This week I replaced my home security camera system with open source Frigate, because I was able to use AI to take the source code, replace the object detection models that were included with the code with something that was a better fit for my machine, customize how the videos were stored and under what circumstances. There's a lot more that I can do with it that I haven't yet as well.

I couldn't do that with the proprietary system.

It seems like we'll see a lot more customized open source options or rapidly accelerated open source projects thanks to this type of thing. I'm really curious to see if something like LibreOffice stops playing catchup with Microsoft and actually passes it.

If the improvement rate of Omarchy for Linux desktop experience can be a barometer for anything, I'm extremely optimistic.

The #1 barrier for me to do 90% of the things that I've done for myself over the last 3 months for the prior 10-15 years has been time. I'm more than capable of downloading Frigate and figuring out how to customize everything, modify and compile the code to do what I want, but it would have taken me hours to days to do it. Now I can setup a couple of stacked /goal prompts overnight and get there. It's fantastic.

I’ve often wondered the opposite. The number of pieces of software I used to pay for that I was able to replace with software I’ve built using agents is nearing double digits. I wonder how much longer people will need to pay huge software companies instead of just collaborate with a few other folks using AI and build their own better version.

Agents replaced open source? An Agent is an actor and open source is an artifact. An actor can't replace an artifact.

Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms and the community around it.

I told AI to create and editor just like Sublime (my editor for the last decade) and it did in less than 10 minutes. File tree, multi tabs, multi carets, syntax highlighting, code snippets, everything I need in an editor (except LSP for now, will be added in v2)

I haven't used Sublime this week, it works as expected and I can't be happier

Oh, and it cost only $2 to build using DeepSeek

Then I told DeepSeek Harness to build a clone of itself in Swift, unbelievably it did!

So, apps are in a downward spiral towards zero value, everybody can do their own. The real value is in market penetration and the race is going to be fierce

I think there will be a difference between foundational software and application software. The more you go to the outer layer the more code will be generated on the spot, throw-away, single usage. On the other extreme, foundational software that is battle tested, security hardened, has survived waves of AI-hacking, will become irreplaceable and crystallise as a semi-immutable layer. Open source is in the best position to win foundational software while agents will dominate the outer layer of disposable code.

This is the biggest opportunity in open source I've seen in my lifetime. I bet you in three years we'll have more and better open source libraries than ever before.

For example, a few months ago I was looking to build a license detection tool, and within a few weeks with the help of Claude built a tool that was 20x better than the best open source one I found (I also open sourced mine as well: https://github.com/licensedetector/cli).

The biggest problem will be navigating through the glut of libraries that have been written in my mind -- 100 tools for the same use case, all with < 100 stars will make it hard to decide between. Also, if the user didn't write them thinking about anything other than their own use cases when releasing their library, the standard response will probably be for the agent or programmer to recreate the wheel yet again, only for their specific use case, making it now 101 tools for the same use case.

Nothing has been replaced. This is just propaganda by a consultant who explicitly is for hire for AI integrations. He has probably never done anything in open source.

He uses open source and sells it out for cheap marketing. Clients take note.

I've noticed that for smaller projects (<=10k lines of code) the valuable thing is no longer source or binary artifacts, it's the encoded ideas, architecture and domain knowledge. A folder of plan files is about as valuable as the code itself, and easier to adapt to new domains

I wonder if that will spawn a new type of open source project. Where we have free exchange of ideas, without necessarily requiring the free exchange of code (which would violate a lot of Stallmann's ideas about open source, but might ironically be attractive to people who dislike AI training on their code)

The ecosystem of open-source reusable components will remain a good idea as long as architectural principles like low coupling and high cohesion still apply—otherwise it’s wasting resources on reinventing wheels.

For one off tools, sure. For ongoing tools, either they are right after the first implementation and you use them for years. Alternatively, you need to maintain them and they decay until you discard them.

You also need to be ok with your tool to do task A (you had an agent build) to work different from my tool to do task A (I had an agent build). Meaning we can’t reliably compare the output from those tools.

What does it mean for open source to survive? Exactly what software are we talking about here?

I don't know about everyone else's experiences, but the AI agent that I use every day at work would rather install a tool or library than spend tokens recreating software that already exists out there. As such, the argument doesn't make much sense to me, personally.

Agents replacing today open-source doesn't means they can do the same in the future. In first place we must all understand that AI is being feeded with existing projects. If we stop creating new projects, may be AI won't have enough base to do the same and the open-source would necessary.

Ironically, this article has so many signs of being written by an LLM that I couldn’t finish it.

False premise. AIs dont generate anything in 30 seconds that has been widely reviewed and tested.

If you want it to be corrrct, it's always easier to install some existing OSS and instead focus on whatever is unique to you.

Your fallacy is the fallacy of the loaded question.

If anything open source is proving to be the last bastion of hope against the trend of being mindlessly replaced by agents.

Why is this on the frontpage again? It's slop writing with a blatantly untrue borderline ragebait premise. Can we please stop this madness? Hacker News doesn't have a downvote feature (for stories), and that absolutely does have its pros and cons, but this needs to stop. This is basically SPAM.

Putting aside the bond I have towards with the FOSS community, I am curious of what will be the new equilibrium of this ecosystem.

"Maybe what’s actually happening here isn’t death or survival, it’s a change of job"

AI sentence structure spills everywhere

As I've been vibe coding a side project, I've been curious on just how much cruft and slop the agents are training on now. A part of me feels like I should actually have it be in a private repo.

What?

Author (which seems like AI) has no idea what open source even means.

Fuck intellectual property and shit. LLMs fuck yeah!

A lot of us out there don't make Open Source for rewards. We just like sharing things. I have about 10 users for one of my projects. If I had 10,000 it would be the same. I'm just glad anybody found it useful. And I like using other projects because at the end of the day I don't want to sit here writing code (even AI code), I just want a solution to my problem.

Maybe there will be fewer Open Source contributors. But maybe there will be even more of them with AI making the labor and maintenance easier. Either way I will still be publishing my dinky project, because it works for me, so maybe it'll work for someone else.

I have paid a relatively big price for a software which does a simple thing: Drawing diagrams. The application? It's called OmniGraffle Pro. That simple looking program drawing diagrams can do flowcharts to scaled architectural or industrial diagrams and everything in between.

Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.

Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.

These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.

Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.

We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act as that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.

As a developer (it sounds like), you were probably never even a drop in the bucket dumped into the ocean of the proprietary software market. Most people don’t want to change their own oil.

Roughly zero.

Not only you're making huge assumptions on AI's ability to build software useable by non-software engineers without professional input, you're also underestimating people's desire to pay just for convenience ("gee, I need a diet tracker, let me find a few people to help me vibe code it instead of paying $10")

Can that software work on other machines that aren’t configured the exact way yours is? Will they survive the next OS update? How about 3? Even super basic terminal scripts I get from my local model are often too rickety to pass around.

I struggle to believe people are running vibe coded software replacements as daily drivers. Certainly not in a professional environment. They are all invariably interesting little projects at best.