AI development tools are not going away. They are massive productivity enhancers, FOR PEOPLE WHO KNOW HOW TO USE THEM PROPERLY.
It depends.
To be more specific, they are massive productivity enhancers over the short term with the trade off being lost productivity over the long term. If your scope is going to be over the long term then using LLM tools is going to be a net negative benefit.
A single small scope disposable project however might be more productive to be vibecoded as the negative effects to the coder (e.g. cognitive debt, skill atrophy, etc...) can be overcome by paying off that debt and reinforcing acquired skills in the next project with thinking through challenging problems and hand coding a larger project.
But you need to take care to make sure it's a one off, otherwise you open yourself up to compounding those negative effects. The real danger is the productivity boost from one small scoped disposable project is psychologically seductive and you risk yourself falling into a cognitive surrender / death-spiral. We already know it uses the same pathways as those found in gambling and drug addiction so caution is definitely warranted.
Rather than banning AI tools in development, the correct approach is to change how submissions are handled in open source projects. Maybe we should move away from treating all submissions equally.
For large projects like the Linux Kernel, you or your organization should go through a qualification process. Alternatives you can look at a referral based qualification. If you submit junk quality code frequently, you lose standing.
Yes, that’s more work, but it’s worth it for the benefits of AI tooling while retaining the best minds on the project. Arguably large open source projects need this anyway.
This can work, but it's easy to get it wrong.
Online competitive gaming suffers a similar problem: If all your opponents are bots or cheaters, then the game is no longer fun and players leave.
The best solution we have for that is shadowbanning. When a user is found to have been cheating, only match them with other cheaters, and don't tell them. But that doesn't work in source forges where bad users can tell they can't communicate with everyone.
The next best solution is to make it expensive to be a bad actor. Make it so that to participate, you need a paid account (usually a small $5 fee). Bad actor's accounts are banned and to participate again, you need to jump through the hoops of purchasing a new account. This is used in gaming with purchasing subscriptions (where the credit card number is blacklisted), or by tying a phone number to the account which is sent a validation text message (where the number is blacklisted). This is also used by phone app stores to combat spam app submissions.
It's not a perfect solution, but it's effective.
