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Notes -
AI & open source
What do you think about LLM's impact in software development?
Inspired by recent events in open source:
Bun's LLM-assisted rewrite
The Bun project was translated from the Zig programming language to Rust, mostly by LLM. This task usually takes months-to-years by hand (e.g. Rust to Zig rewrite), but with the LLM it took 11 days. Its success is debatable: the code isn't idiomatic Rust, and lines-of-code increased 67%, which suggests it will be harder to maintain, but it works (passes the thorough existing test suite), and the maintainer says it's going well in a blog post that provides more details.
In response, Zig's maintainer wrote a scathing blog post personally criticizing the Bun maintainer credited for the rewrite ("[he] was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"). Zig's maintainer is known for blunt strong opinions: he previously moved Zig off GitHub and the announcement was rewritten twice to be softer on GitHub employees.
Earlier, the Ladybird web browser was also rewritten in Rust mostly by LLM. This got less attention and controversy, probably because it was announced better, and the previous language was C++ so they got more sympathy (2-hour video on why C++ sucks).
Rsync's LLM-assisted bugs
Rsync's maintainer got accused of "vibe fuck[ing] up this software", and the discussion got very heated. He explained he has been using LLMs a lot because he's getting lots of vulnerability reports (see below). An AI-assisted analysis concludes the LLM did introduce bugs, although not more than the usual amount.
LLM slop contributions are overwhelming open source maintainers
Many projects are seeing a massive influx of low-quality contributions by inexperienced software developers and bots, heavily relying on AI. This has caused some to stop accepting any outside contributions, while others have added strict LLM contribution policies (see below).
Example: an LLM managed to implement an entire big feature, albeit incorrectly. The file headers also credit random people who it presumably stole code from, thankfully(/s) the LLM concluded there are no copyright violations.
Serious LLM-discovered vulnerabilities are also overwhelming maintainers
Among the slop contributions are actual vulnerabilities discovered with the help of the latest LLMs like Mythos. There's a vague background threat that open-source libraries will become too dangerous to use, but LLMs can also find closed-source vulnerabilities, so it's unlikely.
Cal.com has made their core codebase private and announced "open source is dead", but others point out this probably won't help them, and AFAIK this hasn't become a trend.
curl ended its bug bounty program because of an "explosion in AI slop reports", but still accepts reports and admits they have improved because LLMs have become good at finding vulnerabilities. Although Mythos only found one benign one, because curl is one of the most hardened codebases that exists. Still, legitimate (maybe-issue) reports have increased causing more work for the maintainers, so they're taking a vacation this month.
"Vulnerability Reports Are Not Special Anymore", written by a former security lead, explains that the recommended process to handle them has changed due to LLMs
Open-source LLM contribution policies
Due to the aforementioned slop contributions and/or general ideological reasons, many projects have banned LLM usage entirely, while others require it to be disclosed. Big list. Highlights:
Misc
Picrocrypt's maintainer quits open source because of LLMs: "I want to do something actually meaningful and innovative with my time and life, not command Claude like I'm speaking to a child who forgets something every ten minutes and makes an oopsies every twenty before breaking down every hour."
We mourn our craft: senior developer laments hand-writing code becoming obsolete.
The LLM Critics Are Right. I Use LLMs Anyway. This guy outright admits what most people quietly do: criticize LLMs while using them.
My opinions
For reference: I'm under 30 and have been writing code for most of my life. I've written open-source projects, although they're not popular enough to get LLM contributions. Today I work in formal methods (theoretical computer science). I've always expected my future to involve creating software.
I am sad and worried that software development is changing. I enjoy working with code directly and making it (opinionatedly) well-designed, writing prompts is less intuitive to me and it's harder to control the design. I worry if most of my time spent learning to code better has been wasted, or even my entire Computer Science career.
But software development is much more than writing code, and my specialization is much more than software development. Although I've intrinsically enjoyed it, to me, writing code has always ultimately been a means to an end. And now with LLMs I write code much faster and easier. I also still write lots of code directly, LLMs (even Fable/Sol) can't fully automate my work at least yet.
As I wrote before, in the long term I'm neither optimistic nor pessimistic about AI, but I think it's inevitable and most people should learn how to use it to their advantage. I think it should be possible for those who really despise LLMs to continue to do things manually, there should be a market for "hand-coded" software etc., but they will be at a disadvantage.
I share Linus's opinion that AI is a tool, clearly useful but can be misused or misapplied. I believe its future (at least near term) is for boring uncreative tasks. For example, right now LLMs excel at straightforward (not idiomatic) translation and research, but struggle with high-level design. They also suck at art (no good examples except shallow memes, this is my experience elsewhere) and creative writing. I believe AI's future shouldn't and probably won't be creating art, because humans intrinsically enjoy it and make it very specific to their personalities; but it will make tools that humans use for art.
Lastly, I believe that ideally everything digital would be free and its creators would be paid another way. This means I have no issue with LLMs training on open-source, except they also trained on copyleft (GPL) code, they should be open-source and open-weights themselves.
It will be strictly worse in all cases, for all users, all developers, all maintainer, and all licence holders for the foreseeable future unless there is a massive improvement in the tools. They are good enough to make things that are just bad enough to be an enormous pain in the ass, especially when people who think they know a lot more than they do are using them.
WITH THE MASSIVE EXCEPTION OF: It is wild to tell the robot to write me a little piece of shit that does some shitty little task where i don't care how it works and it doesn't need to touch anything. productivity app providers in shambles, etc etc.
If AI programming was so awful for users and developers, nobody would be paying tens of billions of dollars for it.
Statements by the utterly deranged! I guess lots of people might be getting emotional about self-driving cars, car accident lawyers for instance or race car enthusiasts... The same goes for AI programming but that's no excuse to let it cloud judgement.
Here's a fact that sounds fake but isn't: the best AI developer (Anthropic) had less revenue than Ebay last fiscal year.
Yes, it was roughly $5B in 2025 to Ebay's $11B, also interestingly the best guess for Anthropics revenue in June 2026 was also $5B. Things are moving quickly and Anthropic is projected to have ~$60B in revenue over 2026 with error bars as low as $45B and as high as $80B. Putting it in the class of Goldman Sachs, Intel and IBM as far as revenue is concerned. And well, the straight lines on graphs interpretation makes this year to year change pretty interesting.
Is that with GAAP accounting?
Of course not, but neither is the comparison to ebay. There aren't audited numbers so we're all estimating based on available information.
"You really think a startup would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies about their revenue!?"
I'm not the one who originally tried to make some point about what the speculative revenue tells us about Anthropic.
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