AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.

Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.

Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.

Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.

AI is destined to destroy software industry, but not itself.

Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it.

The current degree of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.

But after just months of being unmaintained, even the best libraries start to rot away due to bugs and vulnerabilities going unfixed. Users, AI included, will start applying workarounds and mitigations, and the rot spreads to the applications (or libraries) they maintain.

Unmaintained software is entropy, and entropy is infectious. Eventually, entire ecosystems will succumb to it, even if some life forms continue living in the hazardous wasteland.

Your original point was that libraries do not need companies behind them. From what you have written here a reason for that is that (web) libraries mostly create churn by introducing constant changes. What I think you follow from that, is that those libraries aren't necessary and that "freezing" everything would not do any harm to the state of web development but would do good by decreasing churn of constantly updating to the newest state.

What I struggle to understand is (1) how does AI fit into this? And (2) Why do you think there is so much development happening in that space creating all the churn you mention? At this point in time all of this development is still mostly created by humans which are likely paid for what they do. Who pays them and why?

Bit rot isn’t some mystical decay, it’s dependency drift: APIs change, platforms evolve, security assumptions expire, build chains break. Software survives because people continuously adapt it to a moving substrate.

Reducing churn is good. Pretending maintenance disappears is fantasy. Software doesn’t decay in isolation, it decays relative to everything it depends on. And it sounds like you don’t know anything about Newtonian dynamics either.

I hear you about damning shitty code which the web industry as a whole is quite responsible for, but I don't see how them dying outright is better.

Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.

There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.

That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.

1. Plant new trees,

2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,

3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,

4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.

We are entering stage 3.

Reminds me of the problem with Google & their rich results which wiped out and continues to wipe out blogs who rely on people actually visiting their site vs. getting the information they seek without leaving Google.

We thought it would give us freedom, but all of the advantage will accrue to the hyperscalers.

If we don't build open source infra that is owned by everyone, we'll be owned by industrial giants and left with a thin crust that is barely ours. (This seems like such a far-fetched "Kumbaya, My Lord" type of wishful thinking, that it's a joke that I'm even suggesting this is possible.)

Tech is about to cease being ours.

I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.

https://www.fsf.org/

But there was money to be made and the friends you thought were friends were just mercenaries with a shiv in their hand.

If we didn't have open source arguably developers would be more secure, way more secure, in the face of AI.

You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.

I fail to see how open source is being "turned against" anyone here.

> we'll be owned by industrial giants

...or how anyone is being "owned by" industrial giants in any way relevant to open source.

> Tech is about to cease being ours.

This doesn't mean anything.

You're just ranting.

There's no such thing. Even if on paper "everyone" has an ownership share, in practice it's going to be a relatively small number of people who actually exercise all the functions of ownership. The idea that "everyone" can somehow collectively "own" anything is a pipe dream. Ownership in practice is control--whoever controls it owns it. "Everyone" can't control anything.

> I really like AI models, but I hate monopolies. Especially ones that treat us like cattle and depopulate the last vestiges of ownership and public commons.

I would dispute whether the tech giants are "monopolies", since there's still competition between them, but that's a minor point. I agree with you that they treat individual coders like cattle--but that's because they can: because, from their standpoint, individual coders are commodities. And if automated tools, including AI models, are cheaper commodities that, from their standpoint, can do the same job, that's what they'll use. And if the end result is that whatever they're selling as end products becomes cheaper for the same functionality, then economically speaking, that's an improvement--we as coders might not like it, but we as customers are better off because things we want are cheaper.

So I'm not sure it's a consistent position to "really like AI models" but also not want the tech giants to treat you like cattle. The two things go together.

Why privilege that side of the equation over "we as workers"? Being a customer isn't all there is to life. I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.

It's not a matter of "privilege". It's simple economics: if the same functionality can be provided more cheaply, that's a gain to everyone. The gain to customers is the most obvious gain, and it's what I focused on in my previous post--but it's also a gain to producers, because it frees up resources to produce other things of value. But the producers have to be willing to change how they make use of resources in order to take advantage of those opportunities.

> I happen to spend quite a bit more time working than shopping.

Then you should be a lot more worried about AI providing the same functionality you were providing as a coder, but more cheaply--because that makes you, or at least you as a coder providing that functionality, a commodity that's no longer worth its cost. So if you want to avoid being commoditized and treated like cattle, you have to change what you produce to something that AI can't do more cheaply than you can.

Don't FOSS by default, unionize, embrace solidarity, and form worker-owned co-ops that aren't run by craven/unrealistic/non-business founders if you want any sort of stability.

According to fair use doctrine, research models would be okay. Models used in education would be okay. Models used for public betterment by the government would be okay, etc

Pie in the sky version would be that models, their output and the infrastructure they run on would be held in a public trust for everyone's benefit. They wouldn't exist without consuming all of the public's intellectual and creative labor and property, therefore they should belong to the public, for the public.

> Tech is about to cease being ours.

On the hardware side, it's bad, as well. Remote attestation is here, and the frog is just about boiled when it comes to the idea of a somewhat open and compatible PC as the platform for general computing.

It was kinda cool while it lasted, glad I got to see the early internet, but it wasn't worth it to basically sign away for my great grandchildren to be peasants or belong to some rich kid's harem.