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Will Open Source Survive the Agents That Replaced It?albertoarena.it

Agents can build in minutes what used to mean installing someone else's package. A debate about whether open source still has a reason to exist once packages are this easy to reinvent.

28 points•albertoarena•9 days ago•61 comments•
#agents#source#open source#replaced#survive#source survive#open source survive#mean

61 comments

brightball8 days ago
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.

SkiFire138 days ago
> 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.

You also didn't give anything to opensource. This shows that AI can allow open source to be used in more cases and in more flexible ways, but in no way does this mean that open source (and especially the good high quality one) will explode.

If anything we saw an explosion of open source projects, most of them low quality slop, and even the ones that used to be high quality are slowly degrading.

potsandpans8 days ago
> You also didn't give anything to opensource.

The prevailing moral panic prevents anyone in the space from sharing in communities where open source is generally discussed. People flag and openly disparage (against community guidelines) and have histrionic reactions.

We'll just have to wait until the topic cools off before we can see how llm usage impacts open source.

brightball8 days ago
That's valid. I didn't contribute anything back yet but I certainly could at the point that I'm convinced the refinements are polished enough.

At the same time, how different is that from much of open source today. Usage is dramatically higher than contributions. How many open source packages are included in every software project we build with. How many of those are any of us contributing back to?

jordanb8 days ago
This is exactly right. The gift economy that Open Source is part of is incompatible with the extraction economy AI represents.
FabCH8 days ago
It shows opensource _usage_ will increase.
someguyiguess9 days ago
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.
bayindirh8 days ago
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.

jlkuester78 days ago
This. I happily pay for IntelliJ software (even though basically everything else I use is FLOSS). It is not really this feature or that feature of WebStorm that makes it worth while, but just that 40+ hours of the weeks it just works. For normal stuff, for edge cases, small projects, big repos. When I need something, it just works (with out me needing to fiddle with an agent to build me some brittle scripting that will kinda work today, but break tomorrow....).
piker9 days ago
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.
ChrisLTD8 days ago
Developers don’t even like to pay for their own code editors. Something they used to work in all day.
le-mark8 days ago
> Most people don’t want to change their own oil.

Changing oil is easy, it’s disposing of the oil that’s hard and why I don’t change my own oil and haven’t in years.

Forgeties798 days ago
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.

glimshe9 days ago
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")

intrasight8 days ago
It's a valid assumption, and it is going to have a huge impact on the SaaS marketplace. "I need a resource tracking application. Let me find a consultant to help me vibe code it rather than pay $10,000 a month."
zkmon8 days ago
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.

matheusmoreira8 days ago
Free and open source software communities were not always friendly, even at their peak... And now there are far too many projects that are outright hostile towards anyone who uses AI for any purpose. Very discouraging.
bakugo8 days ago
Why do you expect people to not be hostile against something that exists to steal their work and replace them?
bakugo8 days ago
> Opensource is defined by it's licensing terms

Licensing terms that are now irrelevant, since anyone can use AI to rewrite it without the license.

> the community around it.

Open source communities are dying due to AI spam.

bcjdjsndon8 days ago
> Open source communities are dying due to AI spam

They're luddites refusing to get with the times

Kuyawa8 days ago
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

JV008 days ago
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.

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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