Vibe Coding is Killing Open Source Software

FTFY. The only difference is that with FOSS the slop is visible to all.

It really is time for UBI - this would take financial pressure off of OSS coders (and everyone else) and ensure that there will always be new source material for the data hungry AI companies.

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS

"Monetize direct user engagement", does that mean their argument is that AI makes it so people don't need to pay devs to handhold them through using very user unfriendly software?

I can walk through tricky logic.

I can pentest and determine issues or if a solution works.

I dont know what is important. I dont know how to rebase git commits and get a pat token unless ai is holding my hand.

I right now only vibe code but I then deep dive through the finalized commits. I am not a programmer by trade and at best I'm a sloperator.

I think my code contributions are helpful.

AI slop kills all that it touches. Art, Music, Movies, Open/Closed source software, journalism, education, the list seems endless.

The possible impact first hit me when I saw the genAI policy on the Asahi Linux site: https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/

Tl;dr is that because Asahi is a project running on super custom hardware, there is no way to be sure LLM generated code is not based on proprietary (Apple-owned) code.

Probably not relevant to the article, I had to rant. I'm drunk, and suffering!

I'm trying the old vibe coding, except with actual specs. I feel like I have to. I hate it.

I think refining the spec/prompt with Claude makes sense. I found it helped me crystallise my spec and highlight gaps & pitfalls.
At which point, I should've just coded it.
I'd have known what it does, and it would be exactly what I needed.
But I figured I'd see what Claude could do.

So, my "dev->staging->prod" (project isn't in production state yet, thought it would be good to try AI on something) database migration system with a planning, apply and rollback stage was built by Claude.
There are system tables that should migrate fully (but allow for review if they are structurally different) and there are data tables that should only alter schema (not affect data). It's decently complex that it would take me a week or so to write and generate, but maybe I can spend a day or 2 writing a spec and seeing what clause can do.

It wanted to use python, and told me that migra is outdated and tried to generate something that would do it all.
I told it to use results (the migra replacement), and after convincing it that results was the actual library name and that it can produce schema differences (and telling it that it is a different API than migra cause it tried to use it as if it was migra, and.... So much wasted time!), I finally got working code. And all the logs and CLI etc resulted in SUCCESS messages.
Except that tables are named like "helloThere" were ignored by it, cause it hadn't considered tables might have uppercase. So I got it to fix that. And it's working code.

It looks nicely complex with sensible file names.
Looking at the code: there are no single responsibilities, no extensibility. It's actually a fucking mess. Variables sent all over the place, things that should be in the current command context being randomly generated, config hard coded, randomly importing a function from another file (and literally the only place that other function is used) because.... I don't know.
It's just a bunch functions that does stuff, named be impressive, in files that are named impressively (ignoring the content). And maybe there are context related functions in the same file, or maybe there are "just does something that sounds similar" functions.

The logging?
Swallows actual errors, and gives an expected error messaged. I just want actual errors!

It's hard to analyse the code. It's not that it doesn't make sense from a single entry point. It's more that "what does this function do" doesn't make sense in isolation.
"Where else might this be a problem" has to go to Claude, cause like fuck could I find it it's probably in a functionally similar function with a slightly different name and parameters or some bullshit.

If I didn't know better, and looked at similar GitHub projects ... Yeh, it seems appropriate.

It is absolutely "manager pleasing complexity".
But it does work, after telling it how to fix basic library issues.

Now that it works, I'm getting Claude to refactor it into something hopefully more "make sure functions are relevant to the class they are in" kinda thing. I have low expectations

I don't EVER want to have to maintain or extend Claude generated code.
I have felt that all the way through this experiment.
It looks right. It might actually work. But it isn't maintainable.
I'm gonna try and get it to be maintainable. There has to be a way.
Maybe my initial 4-page spec accidentally said "then randomise function location".

I'm gonna try Claude for other bits and pieces.
Maybe I'll draw some inspiration from this migration project that Claude wrote (if I can find all the bits) and refactor it into something maintainable (now that I have reference implementations that seems to work, no matter how convolutedly spread they are)

GitHub should have insight on new repositories and repositories that are gaining files like CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md that kind of tip off the use of AI coding.

My guess is there's a super long tail of projects people are releasing as open source that were vibe coded to solve some simple problem. Most will likely fall into abandonment or never reach any amount of viability.

On the other hand the cost of starting a project to solve an interesting problem has never been lower. It's never been easier to take a swing at building something cool that people might like. This should expose new opportunities that haven't been attempted yet.

My intuition says it's not all bad. It's like selling hammers to people who aren't licensed construction workers. Yeah, some stuff will get built that should not be built.

They don’t have to argue. We pretty much all agree.

Unless they like arguing – I won’t judge.

That's a feature.