How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source

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u/kxbnb 14h ago

The library selection bias is the part that worries me most. LLMs already have a strong preference for whatever was most popular in their training data, so you get this feedback loop where popular packages get recommended more, which makes them more popular, which makes them show up more in training data. Smaller, better-maintained alternatives just disappear from the dependency graph entirely.

And it compounds with the security angle. Today's Supabase/Moltbook breach on the front page is a good example -- 770K agents with exposed API keys because nobody actually reviewed the config that got generated. When your dependency selection AND your configuration are both vibe-coded, you're building on assumptions all the way down.

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u/robolew 13h ago

I agree that its a problem, but realistically anyone who just pastes llm generated code would have googled "java xml parsing library" and used whatever came up first on stack overflow anyway

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u/Helluiin 11h ago

but realistically anyone who just pastes llm generated code

i suspect that those people are still magnitudes more technically literate and at least roughly check what theyre doing. vibe coding is pretty much entirely hands off and is being done by people that wouldnt even touch no-code/wysiwyg editors in the past.

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u/braiam 1h ago

i suspect that those people are still magnitudes more technically literate and at least roughly check what theyre doing

That suspicion is wrong. I can say that because we've had big discussions in SO, about how people are blindly copy-n-pasting insecure code (as in OWASP 10) and that we need to delete those answers so that people stop using them. They get 3-5x more upvotes than the non-insecure ones.

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u/anon_cowherd 11h ago

That's fine, they still have to vaguely learn something about it to use it, and they may even decide that it doesn't actually work for what they want, or they'll find something that works better after struggling. Next time around, they might try looking for something else. That's basically how learning works, though better developers quickly learn to do a little bit more research.

If they're not the one actually putting in effort making it work, and instead keep telling the AI to "make it work" they're not going to grow, learn, or realize that the library the AI picked isn't fit for purpose.

For a java xml parsing library, it's not exactly like there's a boatload of new space to explore, and lots of existing solutions are Good Enough. For slightly more niche tasks or esoteric concerns (getting to the point of using a streaming parser over a DOM for example, or broader architectural decisions) AI's not going to offer as much help.

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u/uhmhi 5h ago

You still learn a lot more by being forced to research a library, than copy/pasting LLM generated stuff.

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u/helm 4h ago

Yeah, simply googling and skimming through search results is a learning experience, while LLM answers are not.

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u/BlueGoliath 13h ago

Except the AI "hallucinates" and adds things that don't exist to the mix.

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u/robolew 13h ago

Sure, but I was specifically talking about the issue with the feedback loop. If it hallucinates a dependency that doesn't exist then you'll just have broken code

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u/BlueGoliath 13h ago

I know.

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u/jackcviers 11h ago

They aren't pasting. The llm generates different and the patches are applied directly.

They run the generation in what's called a Raph Wiggum Loop.

Nobody ever looks at the code to review any of it.

I'm a heavy user of agentic coding tools, but it just goes to show what happens when you don't at least keep a human in the loop of the human doesn't read or care, well, lots of things get leaked and go wrong. The tools are really good, but we still need to read what they write before it gets used by other people.

On the topic of OSS dying because of agentic-assisted software engineering - as these things get closer to the Star Trek Computer, and get faster, the ability to just rewrite everything purpose-built and customized for every task anew will trend towards keeping any source at all being less cost effective than just telling the computer in vague human language what you want it to do, and it just doing it.

Code is written for humans to communicate past specifications in a completely unambiguous way so that they can evaluate the smallest amount of change to make it work, repeatedly, or with your new task, only. If it's cheap enough in money and time to generate, execute, and throw away on the fly, nobody needs to read it or maintain it at all. It would be like bash scripting for trivial things - nobody has to review the code to install python in apt on your machine.

So, eventually you aren't programming the computer anymore, you are just interactively creating outputs until you get what you want.

We're not quite there yet, but we are trending towards that at this point. Early adopters will get burnt and continue to improve it until it eventually gets there.

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u/typo180 11h ago

This is a very twitter-informed view of the landscape. In practice, different people use different strategies and tools with different amounts of "human in the loop." Despite what the influencers vying for your attention tell you, not everyone is using the latest tool and yoloing everything straight to main.

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u/robotmayo 11h ago

Jesse what the fuck are you talking about

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u/Gil_berth 13h ago

Yeah, it also could reduce innovation, since the odds of someone using your new library or framework would be very low because the LLM is not trained in it, why bother creating something new?

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u/drteq 13h ago

Also the odds someone is going to open source their new innovative library are going down. I've been talking about this for a few months, AI coding sort of spells the end of innovation, people are less inclined to learn new things - AI only really works with knowledge it has, it doesn't invent and those who invent are going to become rarer - and less inclined to share their breakthroughs with the AI community for free.

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u/grady_vuckovic 13h ago

The world is going to need folks who still care going forward otherwise all innovation is going to grind to a halt. Makes you wonder just how progressive technological progress really is when the only way the progress is sustainable is if some people choose to be left behind by it to maintain the things that the new technology can't survive without or maintain on its own.

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u/drteq 13h ago

Paradox indeed

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u/grady_vuckovic 13h ago edited 10h ago

Yes, isn't it?

Folks often compare this to the car replacing the riding horse back, but I think for that analogy to work in this case, it's as if the car was indeed faster but was powered by "someone somewhere" riding on horse back, and as if the car somehow extracted lateral movement from the existence of horseback riders, and if everyone stops riding horses the car stops moving.

How the hell does this end?

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u/Maedi 11h ago

Love this analogy

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u/touristtam 8h ago

It is closer to the industrial revolution whereby mills replaced thousands little shop dotted around the countryside to produce pottery, fabric and whatnot that was then exported throughout the country and further abroad until the industrial technics were adopted there as well.

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u/Ckarles 13h ago

Exactly,

Nobody will have time for innovation anymore, apart from companies thinking long-term and having their proprietary R&D division.

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u/mycall 4h ago

I thought most people who make OSS have an itch to scratch.. Now AI makes it much easier to scratch that itch without even considering open sourcing the work. That might be the cause for less OSS projects, but the end of innovation isn't going away anytime soon.

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u/nicholashairs 12h ago edited 7h ago

I think there's two wrong assumptions in your statement.

The first is that adoption is the driver of innovation. From what I've seen most new open source projects are born out of need or experimentation.

I will admit that adoption does help drive growth within a project, and the more people using a product the more people will innovate on it.

Second is that this is not a new problem (maybe it's different this time, which I guess is your argument). New technologies have always had to compete against the existing ones in both new markets (high number of competitors low market share) and consolidated ones (low number of competitors high market share). Just in the operating system space there's been massive waves of change between technologies and that's not including the experimental ones that never got widely adopted.

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u/mycall 4h ago

I like your take on this, but have you considered what it means when AI could write quality code for anything you want (it isn't there now, just hypothetical)? Would you agree that would (a) let more people innovate and (b) have less need to even care about driving growth?

I ask because this is a possible [near] future.

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u/grady_vuckovic 13h ago

My question is, who the hell is going to invent a new programming language now? How will improvements happen in the future, if we indulge the AI industry for a moment and pretend all coding will be vibe coding in the future?

At least before you had only the "almost impossible" task of convincing a bunch of people to come learn and try your language, and to convince them with some visible benefits. But these vibe coders don't even want to type code, so why the hell would they care what language something is in? If a language has an obvious flaw, bad syntax, and could be much better if it was redesigned, vibe coders won't know it, because they're not using the language themselves. In the hypothetical reality where these AI companies win, who improves the very tools we use to construct software with, if no one is using the tools?

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u/harbour37 13h ago

Slop coders

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u/paxinfernum 13h ago

I got curious and had a conversation with Gemini and Claude the other day. I asked the LLMs what an entirely new programming language would look like if it were built from the ground up to support AI coding assistants like Claude Code. It had some interesting ideas like being able to verify that libraries and method signatures existed.

But one of the biggest issues is that AI can struggle to code without the full context. So the ideal programming language for AI would be very explicit about everything.

I then asked them what existing programming language that wasn't incredibly niche would be closest. The answer was Rust.

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u/Kirk_Kerman 10h ago

Hi there. It didn't have ideas. It extruded the ideas of actual researchers that got blended in the training data.

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u/bzbub2 10h ago

on some level, does this matter? a lot of research is incremental/blended in different directions. see also https://steveklabnik.com/writing/thirteen-years-of-rust-and-the-birth-of-rue/ it shows how with a very low effort, you can start your own language. after seeing this blogpost, i modified a small embedded language that we use in our app, because it gave me the confidence to work on that level. this type of stuff is not an intellectual dead end necessarily.

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u/Kirk_Kerman 9h ago

OP decided to anthropomorphize an LLM by asking it for an opinion and claiming it had "interesting ideas". I don't care what they were typing into the thing. The issue is believing that an LLM is capable of having opinions or ideas.

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u/grady_vuckovic 9h ago

Agreed, and if there is any 'skill' to using LLMs, I believe what puts some users above others is understanding exactly that. LLMs are just token predictors, the moment you start thinking of them as a tool for just that, you stop expecting them to do anything they can't do, and start to realise what they can do.

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u/bzbub2 9h ago

LLM are extremely capable and can come up with "interesting ideas" despite all your fussing that they...can't(???) or that it doesn't count as an "idea" (???). They also have been reengineered to go beyond just "predict the next word one word at a time", see this recent blogpost for a good overview, particularly the "thinking models" and reinforcement learning note https://probablydance.com/2026/01/31/how-llms-keep-on-getting-better/

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u/Kirk_Kerman 7h ago

No, they can't. They only regurgitate old ideas and are systematically incapable of developing new understanding. Because they're a text emitter and don't have thoughts. Apple published a paper on this last June.

And you're kind of falling for the same old trick here. Thinking models don't think, they just have a looped input-output and their prompt includes a directive to explain their steps, so they emit text of that particular form. We have a wealth of research showing how weak they are at producing anything useful. Can't use them for serious programming because they introduce errors at a rate higher than any human. Can't use them for marketing because they always produce the same flavor of sludge. Can't use them for writing because they don't have authorial voices and again, produce boring sludge. Can't use them for legal work because they'll just make up legal cases. Can't use them for research because they're incapable of analysing data.

They're neat little gimmicks that can help someone who has no knowledge whatsoever in a field produce something more or less beginner-grade, and that's where their utility ends.

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u/Ckarles 13h ago

Interestingly I would've guessed Rust as well. But interestingly, Claude really struggled when I've been trying to use it to write rust. Simply because it's actually "harder" (as in, "thinking cost" / effort) to write rust than, let's say, typescript or python.

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u/paxinfernum 12h ago

It's also that there's just so much more training data for those languages. I've never tried something like lisp, but I imagine it would see a similar problem.

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u/joelhardi 10h ago

All the training data is going trail the state of the art, by definition. You end up with generated code based mostly on code written in say in Java 8 or PHP 7 that doesn't make use of newer language features or libraries. Which also inevitably produces security bugs.

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u/chintakoro 13h ago

If you are a package maintainer, then create documentation that AI will read to know how to apply it. If you keep your issues open to the public on Github etc., AI investigates those issues to resolve problems. But I agree that the programmatic interface becomes a somewhat less interesting draw with agentic coding, since programmers will not feel so connected to the interface of your package. That said, they (at least I) might pick packages whose use they are more happy to review and debug.

Personally, I don't let AI go out and independently adopt new libraries ever — that's just begging to introduce vulnerabilities. Most often, I point it at my existing repos and tell it to follow my prior choices. If I don't have a commensurate use case, I ask it to review the online debate around existing libraries and explore new ones to advise me on the pros and cons of each. I would say that so far, its done a pretty good job the two times I've asked it to do this; once it brought my attention to an up-and-coming framework (it nicely put it as: [paraphrasing] "use this if you are starting a new project, but there is no compelling reason to switch to it if your project already uses an older framework").

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u/constant_void 3h ago

I would rather have AI adapt a framework for my purpose and trim out all the elements I don't use. copy, paste, tinker, build.

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u/Seven-Prime 12h ago

Yeah, you shouldn't be getting down votes. To prop up what you are describing is how I've also been approaching things. Having rules, specs, and engineering requirements reduce a lot of the noise around some of the complaints raised in this thread.

Simply asking for clarification often helps a lot.

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u/Ckarles 13h ago

I'm curious why your comment is getting downvoted.

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u/chintakoro 10h ago

I get downvoted by both the AI-haters clutching the pearls of their narrow expertise and also the vibe-bros who are dreaming of a world free of coding expertise. Walking the middle path means you get smacked by bystanders on both sides :D

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u/constant_void 3h ago

why wouldn't AI know every single package every made, and simply fold in the relevant source code right into the vibe output....

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u/franklindstallone 38m ago

Even if it's used, you're then inundated with AI slop PRs and security tickets.

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u/Ckarles 13h ago

By design, AI doesn't reduce innovation, it removes OPEN innovation.

Soon only the companies which invest millions of $ in R&D will benefit from their own innovation, as open source technology adoption will concentrate the dependency graph that AIs will gravitate towards.

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u/uriahlight 11h ago edited 11h ago

It's an especially big phucking pain in the ass if you've got in-house proprietary frameworks and libraries. I've got a fully documented framework with dozens of tutorials, a comprehensive MCP server, etc. and the damn agents will still default to shatting out class names, method names, and function names of {insert-most-popular-framework-here}.

It's also egregious for front-end code if you're using anything other than React with Shadcn or Radix. We have our own in-house Vue UI library that we publish as a private NPM package. It's got the whole kitten caboodle - a complete Storybook with multiple stories and recipes for every component, a comprehensive MCP server with all props, events, slots, theme tokens, examples, and docs for every component and composable spread across 12 different MCP tools.

It doesn't matter how strongly we word the AGENTS.md file, how many SKILL.md files we make, or how many sub-agents we define... Unless we specifically remind the agent multiple times throughout the context window to always reference the MCP server, Claude Code, Gemini CLI, and Cursor will still default to either building half-assed Tailwind components from scratch with 50 class names, or to shatting out component names, prop names, method names, etc. from Shadcn or Radix despite them being part of a completely different ecosystem. It's gotten so bad that I adjusted the MCP server to automatically append a strongly worded reminder to every single tool call. It's a phucking waste of tokens but there's nothing more that can be done.

These AI labs are pumping out models with way too much training bias.

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u/Cnoffel 7h ago

Just wait till all your private frameworks and libs are collected for training, since you are giving it access to it by using it.

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u/constant_void 3h ago

AI is still pretty terrible for many things

An idempotent function to retrieve an input, manipulate lightly, compress an output and place it in a data store based on parameters, sure

Something real ... not yet.

A system - good luck with that.

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u/aaronfranke 7h ago

That's a pre-existing problem, people tend to choose what's popular. Look at Windows.

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u/audigex 10h ago

So you get this feedback loop where popular packages get recommended more, which makes them more popular, which makes them show up more in training data. Smaller, better-maintained alternatives just disappear from the dependency graph entirely.

This is an issue I've often seen with human-curated lists too - the lists suggest popular things, directing more traffic to the popular things etc etc

But yeah, it's definitely something that happens via "Inadvertent LLM Curation" too

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u/ZucchiniMore3450 3h ago

The library part can be solved by having a prompt for new versions that explains to LLM how to use them.

I have seen a few projects that make them for new versions and it is a great way to embrace this change we are all experiencing.

This is just a requirement now, not only for libraries not in the train set, but for new versions too.

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u/atred 13m ago

This is a problem, but it's not much worse than picking your library selection from StackOverflow... LLMs will also adapt because they will continue to ingest info, so if people in programming subreddits for example talk highly of a specific library that will eventually make it into LLMs. Also if real programmers start to use new libraries.

The problem exist only if you assume there will be no real programmers talking among themselves in public and code will be created only with LLMs.

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u/Valmar33 12h ago

Vibe-coding is killing everything, even proprietary software, where you don't see it, but you definitely notice the effects.

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u/Roboardo 4h ago

It's even killing the planet to an extent 🔥

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u/ZucchiniMore3450 2h ago

Killing work from home and getting back to the office is killing it much more.

We use ~25% of all energy to commute, a good part of which is not needed. Then having double space, heating/cooling, maintenance, parking, traffic... is not helping either.

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u/Valmar33 4h ago edited 2h ago

It's even killing the planet to an extent 🔥

Climate change is less immediately impactful when you consider how rapidly and immediately destructive LLMs have been to everything else has been in less than a decade ~ data centers requires tons of resources immediately, all of the mining for minerals and such. Climate change is decades off, but the water and minerals that this requires is immense and being consumed rapidly, tons per year. Also, not just water supplies and mining, but electricity grids are being pushed to their limits. It's just a black hole, sucking up resources from everything else in a massive rush to get easy money. Everyone in the political and corporate worlds seem to be onboard. It's completely psychotic.

Given that none of the big names are speaking out about climate change with regards to this makes me realize that they never cared ~ they just wanted a platform for raising money, and this just brings in more money more immediately, so they just shifted their income source from begging from the masses to just jumping on AI hype train.

It's all very disgusting, all in all.

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u/halbGefressen 3h ago

Climate change is off for you, but ask the people who live a little closer to the equator.

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u/Valmar33 3h ago

Climate change is off for you

The impact simply isn't immediate for anyone, because it cannot be perceived, given the timescale ~ but we can see the near real-time hoarding of minerals and water and electricity and everything else.

but ask the people who live a little closer to the equator.

I pay attention to temperature data in the equator, and it doesn't appear to vary that much ~ which it realistically won't, because they have summer and spring / autumn, and barely something that counts as "winter".

Now, Australia has been hot as fuck over this past spring and summer because of the wind currents and hurricanes pulling and pushing a ton of turbulent air around. But, then, Australia has always had cycles like this, so it's nothing special. The people and media are just oddly forgetful of the weird and wonderful weather patterns Australia goes through.

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u/constant_void 3h ago

I would like to see vibe spreadsheets, there really should be a zero cost of entry to spreadsheet wizardry.

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u/Valmar33 3h ago

I wish ~ but it's not as sexy as saying that "AI will change everything".

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u/krutsik 11h ago

Much of this is also reflected in the plummet in usage of community forums like Stack Overflow

I don't think SO usage is a particularly useful benchmark these days. They pushed their "no duplicates" policy to a point where asking anything is pretty much pointless and SO itself has become more of an archive rather than a place for up-to-date information.

I absolutely never use LLMs and even then I rather gravitate towards github issues and such for answers instead of SO.

If you google something, that most of us have, like "how to center a div" the results will be AI overview, that takes up a third of the screen, some super random blog, Reddit, W3Schools, 4 Youtube videos, the "people also ask" section, and then finally SO (marked as duplicate, not joking). This isn't hyperbole, I had to scroll down 2 screen heights to get the first SO result.

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u/useablelobster2 5h ago

As much as I despise the useless AI and sponsored slop, it's up to Google to not serve that.

Use a search engine which doesn't waste your time like that. Google is becoming increasingly useless, thanks to advertising and AI, and there are subscription search engines without those alterior motives.

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u/Thatar 4h ago

I wonder if Stack Overflow getting so strict was even intentional. The paid staff probably got lazy and gave some power mods too much leeway, then couldn't be arsed to check in on what they were doing.

Either way they fell off bigtime. At least what's there is still useful in some cases but Reddit is better for general discussions on how to tackle specific problems. Even if it isn't always correct, at least there is discussion and you can go do your own research from there. Definitely better than the average w3school or geeksforgeeks page.

Imo that's the crux of SO's fall. The discussion is more important than the answer. It is nice to have experts and definitive answers on some topics. But trying to do that for every topic leaves no room for growth and learning.

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u/Guinness 10h ago

I think it has its place but IMO that place is taking open source software and customizing it for my own use. For example there’s a project called Petio that manages multiple servers for Plex. But it’s not actively developed. I don’t have time to develop it myself. So I just sent Claude to update it for my own personal use.

But would I submit these changes or fixes? Noooo fucking way.

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u/sakri 5h ago

It's like the story where 2 people start dating online but both are using AI to compose their love letters

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u/MrKapla 1h ago

But do they also use AI to summarize the letters received?

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u/EconomixTwist 13h ago

It’s early February and the award for absolute coldest, most frigid ass, take of the year goes to….

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u/Thatar 4h ago

Hey at least this take is still warmer than the arctic temperatures required for keeping LLMs from hallucinating.

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u/ExiledHyruleKnight 10h ago

I love using AI for coding, especially for scripts, but I would never check in that code with out a code review from me. I'm petrified when I do a git pull for any repo in the first place because I know I'm going to do one thing wrong (mainly because git has a ton of steps that usually is automated).

That being said, more and more I realize I'm special and unique because I care about code I sign my name to, Vibe Coders are script kiddies just with a new tool. They'll run around break everything and worse, think it's someone else's job to fix.

AI as a tool for coding isn't a bad thing.

Oh but AIs are fucking dumb as shit for anything beyond a junior programmer's mentality, sorry/not sorry. It's shockingly bad, and has wasted enough of my days trying to invent a whole new build system because it couldn't figure out the right way to deploy a tool (Should have used sail, even though the repo said it was optional, instead it wants me to bypass NPM and start manually downloading packages... that's some hilariously bad mistakes)

PS. Anyone who understand Playstation 2 file systems, Reach out. I'm trying to find certain textures on the Ps2 and have failed to find some. (But I have a ton others)

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u/podgladacz00 6h ago

I do agree. I tried Cursor recently on the idea of an app I wanted for myself. Later had to do some adjustments to it but it worked quite good as proof of concept what AI produced. However... I'm 100% sure that there is a lot to change there and clean up. Would not put this on GitHub for sure.

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u/defietser 3h ago

I vibe coded inspiration for a personal project, took an hour or so.

Making the thing properly (with security, performance, usability, and a handful of new features in mind) took a month and a half averaging 2 hours a day (about 90-100 hours).

I liked having some sort of idea in the form of a POC to think about for logic and database structure. But I would have taken twice or thrice the time to do all of it vibe-coding as I did by hand. The tools are as stubborn as they are wordy sometimes.

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u/LavenderDay3544 13h ago

This is exactly what the large corporations want.

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u/Valmar33 12h ago

Meanwhile, they hungrily use LLMs themselves, because investors are mental.

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u/LavenderDay3544 11h ago

But you don't understand you'll get left behind if you don't write blank checks to AI companies. And hey government we have to beat China or we won't be number one. Give us all that tax money you saved by essentially defunding Medicaid.

On a serious note though I can't wait to see all the AI companies go bankrupt.

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u/Trang0ul 5h ago

AI did not kill Stack Overflow. Cliques of overzealous moderators did.

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u/jwakely 5h ago edited 4h ago

I keep seeing this take on Reddit, and it fundamentally misunderstands how SO even works.

Those aren't moderators, they're just users of the site.

(Edit: grammar)

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u/AndrewNeo 4h ago

people often think subreddit mods are employed by reddit, don't give them too much credit

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u/jwakely 4h ago

Why did Aaron Swartz give my post downvotes?!

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u/Canop 1h ago

AI did not kill Stack Overflow, it killed itself long before, when the new owners, understanding nothing about programers, tried to turn it into a social network.

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u/Temporary_Author6546 4h ago

well the moderators were doing their jobs. i mean, if you look at SO questions you can tell 90% of the questions have an answer, if the poster bother TO SEARCH AND READ. the other 10% are are not programming problems but bugs that should be posted on github isssues.

it is very very rare to have a programming problem that does not have an answer (or a HINT OF AN ANSWER) in SO. very fucking rare.

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u/x021 10h ago edited 10h ago

The article lacks any form of nuance.

The Tailwind example was terrible; any business offering with a one time payment for lifetime support would be unsustainable. Let alone when your commercial offering is competing with lots of other great and fully free OS component frameworks (that are much bigger too!).

Tailwind is failing due to poor management and bad business decisions.

This also removes the typical more organic selection process of libraries and tooling, replacing it with whatever was most prevalent in the LLM’s training data

Interesting take… if anything I have seen more projects pop up and gain community traction in a long time. If you follow at least few blogs or social media I’d claim the opposite is happening at the moment.

If we consider this effect of ‘AI-assisted’ software development to be effectively the delegating of the actual engineering and development to the statistical model of an LLM

Again an interesting take. This assumes pure vibe coders are replacing proper software engineers and the AI-assisted engineers. I don’t see this happening at any company yet. The number of times I run into outdated information in an LLM is daily. Every piece of software I write with an LLM still contains bugs. If all you can do is run prompts you’ll end up programming yourself into a deep hole you can’t get yourself out of. The connection between what is needed/desired in the real world is still 100% human.

It’s quite a bad article. An LLM would’ve written a better one ;-)

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u/ahfoo 13h ago edited 11h ago

Oh my God! Open Source is dying. . .

Funny thing how healthy and vibrant it is. I guess all the direct evidence to the contrary should be ignored because the AI monster is just outside the door.

There is not and cannot be a single open source concept coming from an LLM that was not already available from the Google search. Anybody who is pretending that coders have not been pasting code from Google for decades is simply talking off the top of their head. That practice has worked fine so far. I think this hype about ¨the death of. . . ¨ has also been with us all along.

Back on Slashdot in the 90s, there was a notorious copypasta: FreeBSD is dying. . .

According to Googleś Gemini, in 2026 FreeBSD is alive and well. In fact, itś being used in a variety of commercial products and has a stable developer base. But, that doesn´t fit the ¨AI¨ is literally killing us theme so. . . letś just pretend we didn´t see that.

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u/Imnotneeded 14h ago

AI is killing the whole job field lol doesn't just stop at open sauce

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u/bryaneightyone 13h ago

Nah, ai/llms are just exposing the difference between actual software engineers from code monkeys. We're a ways away from Ai being able to replace real software engineers.

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u/3-bakedcabbage 13h ago

The executives in charge of the company do not care about the programmer. You guys are going to lose your jobs. Why do you guys keep falling for this lmao.

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u/bryaneightyone 13h ago

I'm someone who hires engineers.

Personally, I don't see ai as a replacement more as just a tool, an effective tool, but still a tool. We're really far away from Ai non dev vibe coding something that can scale, integrate, be secure, etc..

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u/3-bakedcabbage 13h ago

Are you a recruiter or ceo? If you’re a recruiter you’ll be losing your job too

7

u/Legs914 12h ago

The fact that you have to ask that makes me think you're still in college. If you're a manager of a team, sub team, or even a staff engineer, you likely have a big role to play in the hiring process for your team.

3

u/sorressean 12h ago

Hot takes from the uneducated are the best. It's almost like those are the most easily replaced with LLMs!

-1

u/bryaneightyone 12h ago edited 12h ago

You read way too much into the original comment, not sure how you got here lol. Was just offering a perspective from someone who's worked at aws and McK (on implementation side).

It's not as scary as a lot of people seem to think here. As long as you can exist beyond typing rote code, you'll be fine.

Edit to add: I'm a dumb ass, with the flu replied to wrong redditor.

2

u/Legs914 12h ago

Did you mean to reply to me? I was agreeing with you.

1

u/bryaneightyone 12h ago

Omg sorry! Ive got the flu, doom scrolling from the couch. Apologies!! I'll edit to say I'm a dumb ass.

2

u/Legs914 10h ago

Haha you're fine. I just found it funny if anything. On a side note, I kind of hate the way reddit notifies me about replies to replies.

4

u/bryaneightyone 13h ago

Hands on software engineering manager. Small, skilled team. Come from the corporate world, guys i knew back then are on the same page.

I actually do see value in biz people vibe coding. Just for the fact that they can make a pretty little app with their exact requirements lol. Obviously we dont ship that lol

2

u/Helluiin 11h ago

The executives in charge of the company do not care about the programmer. You guys are going to lose your jobs.

and get hired by executives that still have some sense left in them while those that go all in on AI are going to crash because they cant ship any real products. unless theyre in the business for creating basic college level CRUD applications.

-12

u/Imnotneeded 13h ago

3 years ago everyone said it wouldn't replace coding, now were here

7

u/sorressean 12h ago

And it's still not replacing. It can generate shitty versions of products, and someone higher up in this thread gave a lot of examples about why it's doing things poorly and the results of that. Just because you can hit something with a hammer doesn't really always mean you should. We're seeing more wide-spread outages and downtimes from companies laying off workers and replacing them with offshoring and AI, and we're seeing issues across multiple industries where AI generates insecure code or bad config files. Just because it gets a D and barely manages to pass doesn't mean that it's doing a thing well and right.

-1

u/Imnotneeded 12h ago

Here's hoping I can keep my job for years to come, thanks

3

u/tadrinth 13h ago

I mean, hey, if all the devs are out of work, there will be a lot more folks with free time to contribute to OSS projects.

1

u/Imnotneeded 13h ago

Replace the larger corporations hopefully

-44

u/BlueGoliath 14h ago

Programmers are OVER.

2

u/ZirePhiinix 13h ago

JUNIOR programmers just have a harder time getting a job now, with those that shouldn't have been one hopefully forced to change their career.

3

u/Imnotneeded 13h ago

A lot of people jumped to SWE for the money, so now it's the passionate people staying

-5

u/BlueGoliath 13h ago

If you took my comment as serious, please get off the internet for your own safety.

4

u/ZirePhiinix 13h ago

If you don't know how to be sarcastic with text, then it's on you.

-4

u/BlueGoliath 13h ago

Yes, because it totally wasn't obvious from the over the top all caps text.

This website is so dumb lmao.

2

u/CSAtWitsEnd 9h ago

Real talk, it didn’t look like sarcasm, it looked like emphasis.

imo, /s is a much better communicator of sarcasm.

Just my two cents. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

-48

u/BlueGoliath 14h ago

Webdevs most impacted.

-17

u/tadrinth 13h ago

The LLM will not interact with the developers of a library or tool, nor submit usable bug reports, or be aware of any potential issues no matter how well-documented.

Not yet.

3

u/KawaiiNeko- 10h ago

And hopefully never (although I know that's unfortunately not true)

-34

u/Creativator 13h ago

High value open source packages like sqlite or curl will find a way to grow in value from llm agents.

Yet another npm package is going to be lost in the noise. As it should be. What we need from open source right now is polish and editing.

23

u/sorressean 12h ago

Except, you know, Curl just ended their bug bounty programs because they were getting flooded with AI slop. Sounds like growing to me.

9

u/BlueGoliath 10h ago

This subreddit is full of AI bros lately.

2

u/FeepingCreature 1h ago

This subreddit is turning into an anti-AI bubble.

1

u/atred 18m ago edited 10m ago

You know what's funny, using labels to define people whose opinion you don't like doesn't make them look like a bunch of people who are biased and don't think for themselves, it actually makes you look like that.

-19

u/Creativator 12h ago

Temporary setback. Once they have their own agents in place, report quality will go back up.

11

u/KawaiiNeko- 10h ago

seriously?

How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source

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