AI impact on open source

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.

`0:36:24`

That was the mode and the way I was thinking about agents in the first agentic age from November 24 to February 28. I thought all the ideas would originate with the humans. They would tell their agents what to build, and off they went. I don't think that's true anymore at all. I have seen things you people wouldn't believe, ideas coming out of models so great that it makes me humble-... as a person who otherwise prides himself on having good ideas. The agents are incredibly capable of creative thought, and folks who are still stuck in the analysis that agents are parrots-... just regurgitating the ideas that are already there are delusional about the progress that's been made in the last six to nine months.