lean into AI even more
I think its important to distinguish:
-
Leaning into ML-driven tooling for utilitarian automation.
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Leaning into vibecoding, or going down weird chat rabbit holes.
Many (most?) maintainers are doing the former already. That's fine, IMO. It's not uniquely dangerous; its yet another set of tools to integrate over time. But if you aren't okay with that, you're going to have to be very, very selective with the software you use.
The later is rarer among established developers, mostly because those devs tend to not to vibecode if they already know what they're doing. Maintainer status tends to be on merit and history, and so on.
It's possible some projects face significant drama and are left with 1-2 maintainers deep in AI psychosis, but I think that's extremely unlikely with projects as large as Linux, Python, Rust, Debian, Arch and so on. And ultimately it's the human that has to irreversably degrade a project; LLMs won't do that by themselves in any sane workflow.