Remember we live in a world that prioritized capitalism over everything including you. Open source is terrible to make money with.
post
this is satire. it was done as a bit eith alberta tech comedy youtibe channel. did you read the vompany testimonials? one of tbe companies is called "Totally Real Company".
This website was made by two devs quite involved in the open source community. If you don't want to call it satire, suit yourself I guess (though it does present a number of satirical elements, look at the company names in the success reports: "definitely real corp", "profit first LLC"...) but this is definitely not an AI bro company, and more of a warning and reflection on possible consequences of LLMs on foss software.
Here's a link to their fosdem 26 talk that inspired the website and "service" : https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/SUVS7G-lets_end_open_source_together_with_this_one_simple_trick/
It never ceases to surprise me that some people don't see the site for the satire that it is. Bullshit links everywhere, dead # links in the footer, hyperbole and satirical content throughout.
it is very much a real service, unfortunately, as ridiculous as all of this sounds it seems to be a real marketing ploy. It's not satire. It's meant to either confuse people or? I don't even know what's the point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE
I guess it's some sort of "self aware but seriously we're actually like this" satire.
On the "satire" part:
If it is "ironocally" taking real payments to "ironically" provide the advertised service to "ironically" do harm, the fine sure call it satire if you really want to but don't make it out to be a defense.
They are doing harm illegally and should be "ironically" sued to bits. Jail them satirically if it helps.
It's satirical
Ok, let's think this through. Whoever "hires" them ends with a legally questionable codebase to say the least, that has worst architecture and performance than its open source counterpart, while also being unmaintainable and likely costing more to fix than building something the right way in the first place.
So they're taking money from people trying to do this shit? Great.
I don't disagree with you and that's most likely what's going to happen, however it's more so the direction in which this is going which haunts the hell out of me. I'm not just "AI bashing" it's just dystopian. Now we could play this off as just an edgelord CEO if, you know...there wasn't any financial backing to this and genuine interest.
I was honestly expecting the link to be too this: https://youtu.be/bpqFZBWcStU
Which certainly presents it as though it's sincere. But anyone with basic media literacy and familiarity with the interviewer in that video (and I do mean and. Anyone lacking either of those can be forgiven.) cannot help but realise that it's satire. And if you're unsure, read the comments.
it's. not. satire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cahSKUYjuTE if it's satire once again, when does the joke end? If it actually does what it does. Maybe this is more of an ethics debate?
it ends when whoever buys their services realizes they're spending more with duct tape around generated code than just by using an open source library and giving credit
I made an edit on this matter but yes it is indeed satire, apologies, however it's still pretty strange how they did this...i agree with you though vibecoding and close sourcing your shit is just so useless. I can't believe I fell for it but I'm relieved I'm not the only one, and again, despite what you said, how is this still technically satire if it works as intended? No matter how bad it is, the joke doesn't land once you involve money and an actual product.
I'm not even sure it does work. Prime only tried trivial packages, but based on my experience with agentic coding, I'm not convinced they're able to deliver a fully functional package of medium size while being truly clean room.
Also, there's an anecdotal comment on youtube of someone who tried this (on a small package) and they mention the clean room was violated (the AI added implementation instructions to the documentation), had performance issues, and the best part, the generated code had an MIT license. Now I wish Prime had looked at the LICENSE files created.
I don't know why you think linking the same video as was in the comment I just replied to adds any value. Are you that video's creator? Is this all just a way to drive clicks?
You obviously didn't watch the interview with the actual company's CEO that I linked. Let alone read the comments under it. Let me share one.
Despite all the signs that this was a parody, I literally paid them 50 cents for a test "liberation" to see if it was a joke. The tool actually did something, but not only did it violate cleanroom logic by including implementation instructions in the documentation, but the "liberated" code runs almost twice as slow as the original. And to make it even funnier, the "liberated" code was licensed under... the exact same MIT license as the original.
So…it doesn't do what it says it does.
It's a company literally called "evil". The CEO did an interviewer with an AI satirist and he completely refused to take it seriously, saying things like "we receive a lot of love letters…asking as where we live", "we're liberating the world of open source software", and "if people don't like the work that we do, they might like the work that our customers do even less, because our customers are the ones that are paying us for our services, and we're just making our bag".
This is obviously not a serious product.
I think prohibiting reverse engineering would do far more harm.
I am obviously not against reverse engineering, i don't think you get the point I'm trying to make. It's the intent, and just the complete disregard for free software under the guise of "satire", which has been a staple in AI-centered circles(ooooo look we're the villains and there's nothing you plebians can do about it).
Technology is neutral, AI is neutral, the people who run it and build businesses around it to fuck people in the ass, however, are not.
That was quite a refreshing article, and so... human, probably the biggest compliment nowadays.
People love open source software not because it’s free, but because it is open. That openness brings all sorts of benefits
And I really love this quote from it, I stopped to think for a bit about it, but yeah. Being open and trusting the source is waay more important than being free monetarily
Your defense is a YouTube link? Fucking seriously??
Shut up
Is that your counter argument? Are you dense? A youtube link doesn't inherently remove the evidence that's present: it processes payments and generates code and as far as I can tell, does what it says it does. Now we can discuss how efficient it is or not, if it actually does exactly, to the letter, as advertised. My point remains the same, if this is the direction these AI bros wanna go in, they should be chased out of tech centered communities. Quite simple really.
Would you like me to provide sources with MLA Citation?
Shut up. This isn't a college paper, it's a lemmy post.
all 27 comments