AI impact on open source

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.

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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.

You didn't even write it, so I can simply look at what your agent wrote on your behalf and go, "Eh, don't want it." That's always been true in open source, and in fact, I think this is one of the problems with open source maintainers. They have way too much ball of neuroticism and anxiety that requires them to look upon any contribution as an obligation on their part to do everything to get that to land in the code base. That's not true at all. You can simply say, "No," or even better, you can say, "No, thank you." And if you get into the mode of realizing that your project is allowed to exist and evolve according to your vision, according to your roadmap, it becomes so much easier in the agentic age to decline the contributions you don't want because you don't even inconvenience or hurt the feelings of a human. It's just a clanker, and the clanker won't mind. In fact, the producers of clankers, the labs, love when you spend tokens in vain. They get paid just the same. So, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before. I've been running the Omarchy project now for a little over a year, and in the last three months working on Quattro, I have merged over 1,000 pull requests.

Quite a lot of those pull requests were written by people who were not classical programmers, or were programmers in other domains, not Linux operating system or distribution development. They were able to contribute their good ideas because of agents, and I got to cherry-pick the very best of that-... because it was there. Otherwise, those ideas would just have lived inside their heads. Again, Is- that is not the purpose of open source, that we tap into the collective intelligence and creativity of the whole goddamn planet, and we channel that towards a commons where we all benefit from the combined efforts of everyone. Now, there's currently, I think, about 400 unmerged pull requests on Omarchy, about double what it was a week ago. So the acceleration is real, but so are the tools. I'm not reviewing every pull request anymore. I haven't been reviewing them for quite some time now. I have the agents-... review them for me-... and then they will give me a summary about whether something is ready for the decision, the human decision. Should we merge or should we not merge? I don't need to look at all the pull requests that are either wrong, duplicated, bad. An agent can sort that chaff away from me. I just get to look at the pearls-... the good ideas that are ready to go, the bug fixes that the agent has validated in a VM on my behalf.

All the drudgery of replicating and managing open source projects is evaporating at lightning speed, and we are left with the, with the golden juicy parts, the bone marrow of software development-... deciding what should this thing do and where should it go.