It used to suck when there was almost nobody contributing because it felt isolated. Worse was if your project did become popular, you would be managing loads of code AND spending loads of time managing the community than the code.
Nowadays, you probably don't have the community to push back and converse with, just a flood of code with few people you can't actually question it with. So back to isolation but with a million lines of code.
It feels like you would have to have a project with an direct artificial limit to increase the quality of submissions. Like, all submissions must be able to run on a 486 25Mhz and 4MB of RAM, this would keep the code small and manageable. Don't do that, but you get the idea.
At least, others usually take up the job and keep it going with a fork.
Why not? It works for Dusk OS!
Why not? I've been at workplaces where a PR needed to be less than X lines of code without approval from some skip level contributor vouching for it. It's usually an absurdly high limit that you'd realistically never hit in a legacy codebase, but maybe that limit would work fine to filter out massive vibecode PRs.
The goal wasn't to add bureaucracy, but to stop this precise problem: stopping a potentially rushed engineer from pushing in a massive change without oversight. Even large, quality PRs can cause all kinds of long term maintenance issues down the line, so I have no clue why vibecode is getting such grace.
I quite like the idea though... I would love to see a real resurgence in retro computing app development that actually brings it all past the "niche of a niche" stage. Even if it's just "make this fast on a XX MHz CPU" and not even targeting a retro OS... embedded could use a lot of extra talent there too.
After all, restrictions are exactly what sparks creativity in people.
I also think the Linux desktop could definitely do with a lot more restriction, which would also help with the decision paralysis people are often faced with.
There was an attempt to start upstreaming changes to a more centralised, ancestor repo, but this failed almost immediately. Why? Well, whoever owns that upstream will naturally want a say in, and thus will exert control over, what gets merged in. The best case scenario is that you create a whole bunch of work for yourself to conform your code whatever arbitrary requirements upstream demands, or; the worst case scenario is that you effectively cede control over what gets run on your server. But this begs the question: why doesn't upstream just pull from downstream? It's all open source, after all, and yet it almost never happens.
It's been a couple years since then and things have only gotten worse: servers are no longer accepting many (if any) community contributions anymore, instead relying on in-house developers. In a sense, these mods are no longer open source, but rather source available: the vast majority of updates come whenever the sole dev-admin has one of their code-binge days.
Anyway, I think something similar is happening here, with open source more generally, particularly with the advent of AI: any outside contribution is just creating work for you; it's probably going to have its idiosyncrasies from its author; features that you wont want to support or spend time tearing out or waiting for them to tear it out; etc. So if you want a feature, you might as well do it yourself, or get an LLM to do it since it'll probably generate something good enough, without complaint, and without much delay.
I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.
As compared to the friction of another app even though they might be really great, I highly recommend trying out fluxer)
Then also if the developer has already created a discord server, then its hard to slightly migrate the existing users on their discord.
But I am sad about this development though, the community of open source or communities in general moving to discord does feel like moving to a walled garden (one which has increasingly more issues like trying to auto-detect your age and then asking for age-verification and plethora of other issues that a user is exposed to just by using the app which they might be using for the community itself, I really dislike it and I do wish if forums or something better could be used more as compared to discord.)
[Side-note: I built https://mirror.forum which is intended for communities to have both discord/fluxer & also other discord alternatives like stoat/matrix links to eventually help migrate users to these platforms and to help in finding the communities present in these spaces in the first place, I would love some feedback as the website is mostly crickets to be honest]
I highly highly recommend you checking it out, I must say that the first time I used it, I was mind blown that this open source discord alternative actually feels so usable in day-to-day lives.
There are many alternatives to be honest, stoat, matrix,fluxer but fluxer is the alternative I would recommend for public spaces.
The issue now is I think mostly just moving the userbase over to there.
[I have talked to the dev and tried to share it a few times on hackernews as a submission to help get more userbase as I think that HN would definitely love fluxer if it came to know more about it]
(Very slight advertisement but I have tried to build something in this space at https://mirror.forum which can allow a community to have discord,fluxer,matrix,stoat links in the same place for the purposes of discovery of servers in other places than discord and also for the migration of the userbase itself as i think that the problem of an open source solution is mostly solved and this was my attempt at trying to partially help in fixing the moving the userbase issue and making people more familiar with alternatives, though the website mostly has no activity nowadays and I would love activity to happen but I am unsure how to realistically approach so... that's why I am advertising perhaps, I would love to get feedback as well :-D)
We are all getting more and more removed from the profession of writing code. It's like we abstracted away all of the details of writing code and we are spending our days just sending 100 interns on project quests.
I think some will adapt with the times and others will get burned out. This may be the end of open source as we know it, and maybe altogether...
I'm sorry, this is totally ridiculous. Agents can't "debate" or have an opinion any more than your toaster can. They will generate opposing views of whatever you ask them to, regardless of its merit.
Commercial dev is about results and money, and that makes AI almost impossible to resist.
OSS has always been about process. The pleasure is in tinkering with code, collaborating with friends on a fun new idea, and helping people. I don't care about speed.
They kind of did acknowledge this when they said the answer is smaller more trusted circles.
This has been what I look for recently. I prefer projects that are coordinating over discord or similar and have 50-100 total members but with decent activity.
While it is more challenging to stop genuine imposters, we could also add new features to places like GitHub so that maintainers who do run automated tools can make automated analysis available to PR creators without drowning out human discussion threads. It sounds like part of the problem is that new tools have popped up so fast that we haven’t figured out how to integrate them properly yet.
The main change for me has been... if I want to send someone a patch, it's more important now to talk to them about it first. But I was doing that anyway. Join the chatroom, let people know I found an issue and am working on fixing it, maybe get their advice on how they think it should be solved (to make sure it fits with their project and goals), and then send code. And stick around to help with testing and stuff. It's not much different than how things were before everything moved to GitHub.
Talk to people. Be a part of the community. That's what made free software work in the past, and it's what makes free software work now. As the article said, it was never just the code.
Enabled this feature.
Earlier in the days, PR was better than issue, now, I prefer and issue, as Codex with my guidance can create a much better PR.
And in this case carefully crafted, clear, and expressive words that are not too verbose would be the contributions of tomorrow.
I keep going back to LLM Wiki. It has found itself in so many other skills because of its fundamental value. Maybe we don’t have as many pull requests. But that one skill has proliferated in so many other skills because of its value.
You said it was dead. How could there be any fix?
Nobody cares anymore, because literally everyone on the planet can literally make their own mini stacks of things, as another commenter just said.
It's sad, but I don't see any way to put the bunny back in the box.
My project exists for the concrete purpose of helping the community get things done, not for the abstract goal of making good software. (It actually isn't very good software, to be honest.)
If you're a real human being who needs help fixing a bug or implementing a feature, I will gladly take the time to help you. But if you're a bot that is just trying to tidy up my software in accordance with some ideal design pattern, unrelated to the specific needs of any human being, then you can just go help yourself.
Open source projects have had gatekeeping mechanisms for decades. Remember ESR's popular (albeit exaggerated) posts about how to fit in with hacker culture? It's the same thing. There's nothing wrong with it. New contributors must prove that they know how to be a good member of any community they're trying to enter. There's no abstract ideal of openness-to-all that we must somehow all strive for. Follow the needs of the actual community that you care about. Don't feel sorry for spammers, especially non-human spammers.
At some point I think AI technology available to us will be advanced enough that "slop" is largely a thing of the past. Some of the issues here will still remain, but hopefully at that point a PR review could be largely automated, in a trustworthy way.
All of this still happens in a world where people aren’t typing the individual code lines by hand.
You just have to adjust and move on. Don’t let your code quality decrease, fight off those that submit vibe coded bullshit and push forward. You’ll find there’s people still behind the prompts.
It’s not totally equivalent but there was a time where all programmers wrote assembly or the like. They’d look at JavaScript with disdain if they saw it in their day. Yet people kinda just.. moved on.
I'm not too surprised by the recent problems but I see them as intensifications, not a new problem. As development platforms became larger, low quality contributors and people who wanted something on their CV became more and more common. That there's never been any kind of trust system makes these issues inevitable.
At first i thought it was going to be a pure counter-AI rant, but no, the author admits using AI everyday in a variety of ways.
Another argument, maybe OSS of smaller packages is on its way out as we get to generate whatever is needed on the fly?
I can't really blame anyone involved in either side of the equation--Sindre Sorhus doesn't blame AI, and OP doesn't blame maintainers--this is just the natural evolution of.. everything! That which does not go extinct... evolves.
Or is it the other way around?
Doula your grief.