The productivity gets siphoned to the AI companies owning the AI.
It's been proposed that we start collaborating in specs, and just keep regenerating the code like it's CI, to get back to the feeling of collaboration without holding back on the energy and speed of agent coding
I really like this thought. We used to take pride in elegant solutions and architectural designs. Now, in the era of shipping fast and AI, this has been disregarded. Redundancy is everywhere, spaghetti is normalized. AI code has always been unsettling for me and I think this is why.
I see a future where those that survive are doing mostly architecture work, and a few druids are hired by AI companies.
Everyone knows reading code is one-hundredth as fun as writing it, and while we have to accept some amount of reading as the "eating your vegetables" part of the job, FOSS project maintainers are often in a precarious enough position as it is re: job satisfaction. I think having to dramatically increase the proportion of reading to writing, while knowing full well that a bunch of what they are reading was created by some bozo with a CC subscription and little understanding of what they were doing, will lead to a bunch of them walking away.
"The Ghostty project allows AI-assisted code contributions, which must be properly disclosed in the pull request."
Mitchell Hashimoto (2025-12-30): "Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good. There are users out there reporting bugs that don't know ANYTHING about our stack, but are great AI drivers and producing some high quality issue reports.
This person (linked below) was experiencing Ghostty crashes and took it upon themselves to use AI to write a python script that can decode our crash files, match them up with our dsym files, and analyze the codebase for attempting to find the root cause, and extracted that into an Agent Skill.
They then came into Discord, warned us they don't know Zig at all, don't know macOS dev at all, don't know terminals at all, and that they used AI, but that they thought critically about the issues and believed they were real and asked if we'd accept them. I took a look at one, was impressed, and said send them all.
This fixed 4 real crashing cases that I was able to manually verify and write a fix for from someone who -- on paper -- had no fucking clue what they were talking about. And yet, they drove an AI with expert skill.
I want to call out that in addition to driving AI with expert skill, they navigated the terrain with expert skill as well. They didn't just toss slop up on our repo. They came to Discord as a human, reached out as a human, and talked to other humans about what they've done. They were careful and thoughtful about the process.
People like this give me hope for what is possible. But it really, really depends on high quality people like this. Most today -- to continue the analogy -- are unfortunately driving like a teenager who has only driven toy go-karts. Examples: https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/discussions?discussio... " ( https://x.com/mitchellh/status/2006114026191769924 )
> @zeroxBigBoss: .. It's not all AI, I have experience with Zig and MacOS, ..
> @mitchellh: I appreciate it! And my bad on the experience, I must have misunderstood or misremembered your messages
Use xcancel. For the very least to see an entire thread.
I wouldn't bet on it
SlopHub
This has always been the problem with github culture.
On the Linux and GCC mailing lists, a posted patch does not represent any kind of commitment whatsoever from the maintainers. That's how it should be.
The fact that github puts the number of open PR requests at the very top of every single page related to a project, in an extremely prominent position, is the sort of manipulative "driving engagement" nonsense you'd expect from social media, not serious engineering tools.
The fact that you have to pay github money in order to permanently turn off pull requests or issues (I mean turn off, not automatically close with a bot) is another one of these. BTW codeberg lets any project disable these things.
> If the job market is unfavourable to juniors, become senior.
That requires networking with a depth deep enough that other professionals are willing to critique your work.
So... open-source contributions, I guess?
This increases pressure on senior developers who are the current maintainers of open-source packages at the same time that AI is stealing the attention economy that previously rewarded open-source work.
Seems like we need something like blockchain gas on open-source PRs to reduce spam, incentivize open-source maintainers, and enable others to signal their support for suggestions while also putting money where their mouth is.
Skynet was evil and impressive in The Terminator. Skynet 3.0 in reallife sucks - the AI slop annoys the hell out of me. I now need a browser extension that filters away ALL AI.
Then I just took my hosting private. I can’t be arsed to put in the effort when they don’t.
is this satire?