AI impact on open source

`0:27:42`

Correct with just one user in mind. And then there's a version of that that is- starts with one user in mind but expands to a larger audience. So I've actually written a large number of software just for me, and I find it easier to do and better to get my situation done. For example, I have a video editor I've written, which is very easy to do just for me.

`0:28:35`

Yes, but it is simpler than you think. By the time you're done building the tool for yourself, you simply tell your agent to put it on GitHub. You don't even have to do anything else. It will figure out how to put that repo on GitHub. It'll write a nice README. It'll start using GitHub releases so that you can track things. It'll actually be a better software maintainer than you could ever be-... because it is far more patient, it is far more diligent in doing the drudgery of managing open source software than you are. And you can simply get on with the joy of using the software that you built and evolving it as you see fit. Now, this gets into the big argument we've been having in open source for a while. Is AI contributions good or bad for the maintainer? There's a lot of maintainers right now who are quite upset about the fact that they're suddenly getting a huge influx of pull requests, of contributions from people who may not be the best programmers or programmers at all-... towards their software. I look at that argument and go, "Are you kidding me?" Here is a vein of free contributions that you can take or don't take, but you're complaining about the fact that they're there? It sounds straight out of- My steak is too juicy and my lobster too buttery. What are you complaining about? This is the most amazing thing. This is what we proclamated for so long was going to be the magic of open source, that we could all contribute to it, but it was, of course, never true.

There was only a small subset of people who contribute to open source, and that was the very highly skilled wizards. So this is a bit of a reformation moment. We had this disintermediation between us and the computer, and it was this class of clerics and priests called programmers, and suddenly they're being disintermediated here by was it the 95 theses by Luther in 1500s, nailing them to the door? And one of those was very clearly about the intermediation, that you should have direct access to the higher intelligence.

`0:30:56`

100% you do, which is also something that's always been true about open source, which is the second argument that really grinds me. I've been running open source projects for 25 years. I have literally looked at the output of thousands, if not tens of thousands of programmers. I feel like I have the statistical basis to assert that most programmers, they suck. And I don't mean that in the way it sounds. That was why I paused for a hot second here. I mean, they suck in the sense that they don't write the code I want to have written. They don't prepare their bug reports with all the relevant information. They don't detail their pull requests with the why. They don't bother to fill in needed code comments. They don't double-check their work. They don't write unit tests. They don't do all of these things it takes to create good software. But do you know who'll do all that stuff? Agents, if you tell them to. They're very diligent at following your instructions, most of the time, sometimes to a fault. But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open source project, they're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of my projects than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it.