One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.
I'm not habitually modifying the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.
100% agree on "clone X and tell me how it works". I'd also add: "clone X and see how it does Y; use that as design reference for building feature Z" if licenses permit.
On modifying software... I forked codex in ~Dec and had my own lightweight "plan mode" and a few other things. It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated. The models were less good then, and maybe I should have learned some rust first. But it was close. For a less fast-moving codebase it'd have worked, and that was 8mo ago.
On the other hand as someone building in devtools for the first time, I struggle with how to think about this. We're building a cloud agent + sandbox platform, https://boxes.dev - same problem space as the author's product exe.dev. We could open source our client or the whole stack (we've been thinking about it), but we're adding stuff so quickly that anyone customizing would have a hard time with updates. There's also a lot on the hosted side that users couldn't modify unless they self-host.
But I like this vision of a world where software is some fluid thing, and everyone is writing personal mods and building off of others' - basically OSS with forks but where every user (or their agent at least) is engaged with the code.
As an end user, I don't mind if you're building a product with rapidly changing API's out in the open. I'll still use the product if it's useful and deal with the churn. What I DO care about is not having half of that project rug pulled 12 months down the line when your Series B folks decide that this particular money knob needs to be turned up.
So if you want to not piss off your users, that's the way to do it. Build a model where you can actually sustain the product, and no, giving it away on seed and series A round money then rug pulling that gift is not the way to achieve that.
How are you handling the actual provisioning of the agent boxes/VMs? Are you using a specific provider/cloud, or multi-provider? Are there any providers/clouds you've found are better/worse for your use cases?
Asking because I am working on an open/standard protocol/layer for provisioning cloud resources across different providers. One of the ideas is to provide a marketplace of providers/resources via one unified/standard API, which I would allow automatic selection and provisioning of VMs (and other resources) based on price/value/feature/reputation requirements/priorities.
Coder uses terraform providers to do the provisioning. I think that's the correct layer of abstraction, all major providers will be there and can be customized with the modifications needed via various other terraform features.
I've written three different solutions for platforms that solve this standard protocol layer. What has worked for us was deciding to standardize on the Kubernetes API for our services back in 2017, and then from then on, all our providers have provided either a k8s API to interact with resources, or provide a Cluster API for provisioning. For example we have two datacenter VM providers that implement the k8s API and we've been able to swap the providers with no user refactoring, it's a good solution in hindsight with how many people have k8s in their stack.
For the second big feature you're thinking of, we never really go a good solution to this problem, a lot of our workloads are long lived and not necessarily spot instance-able, but it's a very fun routing problem. Most of our need to be in multiple clouds is that we want to heavily separate our customer facing services, and keeping it away from internal workloads that support those customer APIs.
Is this public work? I'd love to take a look. This is my bread and butter.
> On modifying software [..] It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated.
I don't mean this as a criticism in any way - but the need to keep your changes current is a strong motivation for getting those changes incorporated upstream.
> but the need to keep your changes current is a strong motivation for getting those changes incorporated upstream.
But the cost of contributing changes made by AI is higher:
* high chance of the being just rejected because code made by AI, or PR made by AI
* so contributing would require carefully preparing a human-made patch (but that becomes much more work than telling an agent to just upgrade my fork)
* there is still a high chance for the patch to be rejected or just ignored for months/years, like before
Also, there are much more vibe coded projects which are open source, but the author has no interest in maintaining, so issues/PRs will just be ignored.
I have sent countless small bug fixes even before, to tools that I use that I could dig into when something was off... No big heavy lifting, but plenty of "tinker on your tools" stuff. And I don't think what I did was that special, so maybe the experiences are different?
The current LLM-driven stuff seems to break down the expectations, and now there are a lot of places which just ignore anything I send in (the same tinkers as before), generally, for a while. Though there are some tools that picked up the pace and actually react faster (so YMMV here too).
But there are few things more frustrating as being half-way. Case to point is LM Studio. It's closed source, has bugs (duh!), and there's at least a GitHub issue tracker to report the bugs -- but then by and large nothing happens to those reported things. It's almost worse than not having an issue tracker (then I could justify never to really touch LM Studio again, this way I keep hoping against hope that reports will turn into fixes and thus I keep using and keep reporting...)
The solution for this is to pay open source maintainers for their attention. If I want them to review and merge my bugfix I should attach $1000 to the PR.
This is actually not a bad idea for funding open source software. It used to be that you’d have an author who coded a project and then could fix the occasional bug or two quickly.
Now, we have larger projects where it is rare for one people to have a complete understanding, and the main value is a person to reviewing patches and bugs to make sure the changes align with the larger goals/path for the project. There is little incentive for a maintainer to do this, aside from wanting to limit forks.
Paying for that review might be the way to keep this whole model sustainable.
That's my biggest gripe with open source software. It's not really the open source part that's bad, but when projects turn into major projects with a substantial user base, I think the owners have an obligation not to delude their users into thinking they have more say than they actually do. Plenty of big projects leave their issue trackers public and have docs that encourage community contribution, yet effectively ignore user submissions unless perhaps someone with a name raises an issue. I completely agree that allowing users to waste their time believing their issue or pull request can make a difference is actually worse than not allowing public submissions in the first place.
I'm not sure why I seem to be in the minority on this. Maybe I've just had bad luck in that most of the issues and PRs I've submitted to open source have been ignored. Hell, I'd prefer a "thanks but no thanks" or even "fuck you" over radio silence. The typical response to this frustration of mine is "just fork the code, bro", which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.
Does it? I think a lot of software projects which are not as huge as the Linux kernel etc. thrive best with a tight core development team, and not from a "community" if you mean that word beyond "users".
Look at it from the point of view of a maintainer. Not sure if you've ever tried. People want to pull your software towards a million incompatible directions. They write some big patch and then get angry if you don't merge it.
My advice: consult the maintainers first whether they agree with your idea and whether they are open to considering your submission. You still won't have a guarantee that it will be accepted, because that's their final say. But at least you won't spend effort coding up something that they could already tell you they don't want to have in their software.
The two are correlated which does encourage that mistaken view. Github culture generally blends these two, having an open issue tracker, pull requests etc. as well as the code right there, often with a free license.
But you can very much allow bug reports and feature requests in public while developing proprietary software and you can also very much work on a project alone or with a small group without being open to random patches, contributions or requests and be open source / FLOSS.
The key definitional question is the license, not any of the cultural stuff.
I now have a fork of Ghostty that is kept up to date with AI and automatically triages and then PRs issues. All because I wanted to have a built in settings page instead of a config file I needed to edit. The future of software is custom per user.
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
As someone who way long before the LLM age had small patches accepted in several dozens of projects I've been using, I can assure you that this is just a matter of mentality. All I needed to be able to do that was to stop thinking that "nobody has done it so far, so it must be hard" and just do it. Sometimes I failed, but more often than not it turned out it wasn't hard at all and nobody has done it so far simply because nobody cared enough to attempt it.
> Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother.
Not my experience at all. Usually the only limiting factor is the size of the project. Compiling a web browser on my 7 yo 13" laptop is a miserable experience, but compiling most of the desktop components or utilities is and has always been a breeze and, in my experience with both Debian and Arch, just a matter of grabbing the distro's source package. I even do it on my phone these days.
Ha, yes! A few times I've had a back and forth with Claude about why software X isn't working as I expected it to, with Claude coming up with more and more ludicrous explanations, and in the end I say, "just go and read the code", and it remembers it can do that and goes and does it and then finds the bug, or the weird UX design or whatever. It's really helpful.
1) I think that is a really interesting insight. I have never done the above myself, but often I don't "tinker" with things because the amount of energy it would take me to JUST GET IT RUNNING is large, and I might end up borking my own system in doing so.
An LLM in a VM can reasonably and safely completely work out on its own how to run some software. I'd never thought about really doing that as a reflexive thing when I am curious. Good thought.
2) I wonder if this is going to be a bifurcation. Where open source software is looked at far more often than in the past because it can actually be "live" investigated (not just have the code reviewed) with little effort?
3) On the opposite of 2, I wonder how many people are going to start "close sourcing" their software, because previously they could be open source, and rely on the inertia of actually getting it running to be enough to support a consultancy service or whatever. If getting it running is trivial, then maybe I need your service less, I just need the code. Might result in different business models?
> I wonder how many people are going to start "close sourcing" their software, because previously they could be open source, and rely on the inertia of actually getting it running to be enough to support a consultancy service or whatever.
I do think there's a bit of a risk there, actually.
It's not just the consultancy thing - it's the competitive advantage of the software itself.
Used to be that you could release open source safe in the knowledge that few people would extract core parts that they need and discard the rest, or fork the project in another direction, because the friction was too much. Better value for people to contribute to your project directly, which provides a great deal of value in exchange for releasing it in the first place.
Now... if you invent some brilliant new database indexing scheme and release it as open source, I can point my coding agent at your code and have it imitate your new insight in a few minutes.
For some projects that's fine, but for projects that intended to commercialize that's not ideal at all.
So yeah, I do worry about the way coding agents distort the previous incentives for open source projects.
> the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that
Alternately: The collective capability is what makes important lasting changes, but individual capability is still a required building-block to get there.
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The canonical example was RMS needing to fix a printer driver bug back before software updates were really a thing. That meant that there was a greater motivation for users to maintain their changes.
Today, with software being an evergreen stack of turtles from the BIOS all the way up the OS to the remote APIs the qpp interacts with, expecting a user to indefinitely maintain their private fork of any software is a really big stretch.
Unless it is a local-only, unmaintained project that doesn't get deployed through a software repository or an app store, I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.
> I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.
RMS has never supported open source. And never emphasized software repositories or deployment or app stores or whatever. He is a proponent of free software based on ethical motivations, to allow users the freedom to control how their computing is done. It perfectly fits the local-only personal project.
Actually, the harsh reality is that for a large majority it has been an easier way to pirate, nothing else, while feeling entitled to scream at the poor maintainers for not implementing whatever features they needed for yesterday.
HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?
This is also completely self inflicted. This is one of the only professions that does not want to pay for their tools and will do anything to get it for free, including building it themselves.
So this is quite unsurprising that open source developers have become this decade's new starving artists asking for donations for their "free software" only for a coding agent to do it for close to $0.
Perhaps, but it is also the way in which LLM providers eat their seed corn. If everyone publishes less because the only one to consume it will be an LLM gives no credit, then LLMs will lose training material over time.
Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time because the maintainers of the projects don’t want AI slop contributions, but now you depend on these changes for your own use so now you’ve created more work for yourself keeping your own fork up to date.
I used AI to help me make a change to a library I use that ended up being a single line of code. The pull request was refused for having a Claude attribution even though it was a single code change that was syntax only with no change in behavior just to make it compatible with an older version of the language they claimed to support (so I considered this incompatibility a bug).
Ended up figuring out a workaround in our application code instead just so we could use the upstream. Still not really worth the effort for most projects even with AI.
In the era of AI slop being bombarded at you from all sides 24/7 I don’t blame them. Gatekeeping is the only way to maintain a semblance of quality (and sanity). Once you let slop in it accumulates at an insane rate. You need zero tolerance or you will be overwhelmed.
> Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time
The linked article has an ambitious solution for that, in the form of this prompt to a coding agent harness:
Set up a nightly cron job that
executes the prompt: fetch upstream
changes to the <software> and
rebase all local changes on
top of upstream. Check that the
software works as intended and
replace the current version.
Maintaining a fork seems trivial for an LLM. Replaying each upstream commit against your fork is exactly what even dumb models can do without issue.
But at the same time LLMs also let you question why you’re using a dependency if it’s causing certain issues for you.
e.g. I got tired of waiting for libghostty to publish a new stable release since the one in March which would have a memory leak fix I reported, so I spent a week of getting LLMs to build my own solid pty/terminal emulator. Now I have my own and frankly I'm in a better position having done it.
That's a ridiculously massive change to our relationship with software projects.
The cool thing is that you can use and adapt the tests of all major third party terminal implementations. Come up with your own invariants (brainstorm them with a smart LLM), and now every third-party test either passes, diverges (due to invariant/arch), or diverges (due to product bug).
And even if you aren't that robust about it, terminal apps are the sort of ideal vibe-coded app since, using it daily, you are giving it a constant real world test that uncovers issues to be fixed incrementally.
Is neovim over tmux over ssh glitching? LLM can fix it.
Is codex or claude code overwriting lines in the TUI, maybe due to alt screen, but it also happens in other major terminal apps? LLM can figure out why and whether you can come up with better general architecture to fix it.
Is there behavior you wish you had but no other terminal app supports? LLM can add it.
You can end up with a far better product than what you would find in the wild, and it's a fun sort of work.
> Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time because the maintainers of the projects don’t want AI slop contributions, but now you depend on these changes for your own use so now you’ve created more work for yourself keeping your own fork up to date.
I thought about this but I currently maintain a fork of about ~6 things I use on my own, none of which I have any interest of contributing upstream because it'd be out-of-scope and put a burden on the maintainers that is unrelated to their primary goal. It has been an extremely easy experience with claude to keep those tools up to date on top of upstream.
StGit/Stacked Git is a proven tool for this and has worked wonders, I can literally just ask claude to fetch upstream and reapply stg patches on top and fix each patch if they break in order. I also keep extensive description of the INTENT on the stg patches so claude can easily figure out if something is no longer relevant (ie: somewhat implement by upstream) or where to land the code/hooks. I've added features, reworked how algorithms work (pathfinding related!) and small nits I hit on daily usage.
Even on a very churny upstream (one of the projects the single dev likes to refactor alot) it's still extremely chill and doesn't take more than an hour to get it updated when everything breaks. I can't say i care enough to setup a daily cron like a sibling suggested, but it would likely work just based off of this stg experience.
It's also nice, because some of those were actual bug fixes too which i have contributed back upstream! Maintaining your personalized fork is truly reasonable nowadays.
> even though it was a single code change that was syntax only with no change in behavior just to make it compatible with an older version of the language they claimed to support
It seems like a great stretch to call this "slop".
I agree but it’s their project and their rules. To them I’m just another guy tossing slop over the fence they don’t have time to review in the hig stack of all the other slop.
> I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Still highly dependant on one's access to SOTA AI models (availability and funding). Most people praising LLMs publicly for this sort of use case, are the ones with unlimited access to tokens / AI credits, or simply with a lot of money to burn.
But reality is that between using one's limited employer-sponsored quota of tokens to do their 9-5 business logic coding maintenance job, versus exploring 3rd-party software as end-users, I am sure of which one their managers will prefer.
I believe it will eventually happen, whether with SOTA local models on highly capable local hardware, or super cheap inference APIs... or both.
A couple of years ago LLM prompts really were incredibly cheap and falling in price. OpenAI's own models had fallen in cost by a factor of about 1000x since GPT-3.
They were also cheap because many of the things you might want to do with an LLM took in the order of a few thousands tokens, at most.
Then coding agents happened, and suddenly we had a reason to burn 100,000s or even millions of tokens on a single task. Stuff got expensive!
(Classic Jevon's paradox right there.)
It feels to me like that's trending back down again though. DeepSeek and Kimi are massively less expensive than OpenAI and Anthropic, and almost as useful.
OpenAI dropped the price of Luna by 80% the other day, and it's proving very capable of exploring codebases and generating quite competent code.
So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.
> So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.
But then what stops the upstream tools from doing exactly the same thing and getting the same speedups? I've certainly seen AI become a huge boon in my debugging experience for random user reports for example.
FWIW if we are talking about hyper personalized software like the OP, it's going to quickly go beyond "debug and maintain" and towards bigger issues like UX, ergonomics, features etc. And at that point, if the upstream is also being developed you will have differences between your personal visions and upstream
Is the answer at that point "accept whatever AI does"? That to me seems to clash with the entire premise of hyper-personalization which is where your vision is what matters not the AI's. Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?
> Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?
Yeap. Most users want someone else to think for them. Not just "something" (AI). Having a vision on what works best (design) is still, for the time being, a human task IMO.
I mostly work with Python, and often coding agents answer questions about dependencies for me just by digging around in the site-packages folder in whatever virtual environment they have access to.
The "clone X and tell me" trick is something I mostly use on my phone - I can answer questions about pretty much any piece of software on GitHub with a regular Claude session, no coding agent needed.
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security, usability and accessibility
> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I imagine you are correct that most people historically didn't inspect or modify most tools they use, but most developers I know who have relied on open source software -- even if they didn't contribute directly upstream -- have had the experience of locally patching a small bug or adding a small enhancement to suit a use case, or studying a piece of an open source module as a starting place for their own implementation for some piece of functionality, or doing a cursory scan of a project to make sure it isn't e.g. phoning home, or simply taking a morbidly curious look to see how the sausage is made.
Sure, I'm not a representative sample and it would be great to have some actual numbers on this, but I have observed this among engineers at Fortune 500s and YC startups, but also non-tech businesses as well as at local public utilities and health systems.
Anyway, I agree that LLMs can provide a lot of value here and reduce the friction but I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously because most people didn't have time to read code. It provides value even without developers reading code in the first place, and reading code was historically one of the essential parts of the work
Yeah, due to the friction of maintaining a private fork, I always upstream bug fixes I find where the fix is simpler than a work around. It's just neighborly. I don't it very often, maybe every 2 years? But a lot of other people do so, and it adds up; open source software continues to improve pretty substantially over the years.
And when I'm debugging I read all the code I have access to - certainly glibc pretty often, Python C implementation and C libraries quite often; the Go runtime, if only for the education, etc. It's not often I need to read the kernel implementation, except sometimes for networking protocols where it's also educational. I have found over my career that reading excellent code is as important to the quality of my code as writing code and iterating on it to make it good.
> I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously
Don't get me wrong, I've been a strong advocate for the benefits of open source for decades. I think it's delivered enormous value, and most of the top valued companies in the world today wouldn't exist without open source!
What's new now is that the end user inspection and modification benefits are feeling a lot more material for a lot more people than before.
No worries, I thought so, and agree with your point -- I'm a fan of your work and datasette historically was something I leaned on often at work and in personal projects. I have read some interpretations of recent developments that misunderstand what programmers and mathematicians do and have done, so was filling in the gaps in what you wrote to speak to some of those
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
A lot of modern open source software is often written in dependency heavy languages.
So to do a "proper" examination, by definition you need to consider the dependencies as well as the core code itself. We all know how supply-chain attacks are on the rise.
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
Hell, even when I can justify the time commitment for that, I can't justify the ongoing maintenance burden of fixing up my patches to work on the latest version every release or major security fix...
I agree that devtools should be open source, but... I very much disagree with the premise that no tools should have config files, options, or plugin systems, and instead when you want to change something like your text editor's font size, you should have an LLM download the code, change the hard-coded value, and rebuild it.
That's just so inefficient and wasteful. Assuming a world in which LLMs do most of the coding work, do we want to burn electricity having the LLM build an options dialog or config file parser once, or do we want to burn electricity millions of times as users want to change any little thing about the software they use?
I really hope what you should expect is my answer to that question isn't controversial.
Having an LLM do bespoke customizations that are unlikely to be interesting to other people? Great, sure. But adding a generally-useful feature to a piece of software, but not caring to try to upstream it? Lame. Lame, lame, lame.
I completely agree - we've seen that tools with plugins are really scalable and then allow the better plugins to be folded back into the main tool where they become popular. I've taken that approach with my own dev tools that I've created.
Even pre-LLM this is how suckless tools work, I actually don’t much mind having to edit a variable in a header and recompile when you make a config change.
The real waste is that tweaking a config setting is a one-and-done deal, I don't want my tools to be side projects that require maintaining their build chains and frequent customization even if an LLM is doing the heavy-lifting.
Updating a constant versus a config parameter isn’t all that different if the build is fast.
I do think modularity will remain important because it makes merge conflicts less likely, and a system with good modularity could look a lot like a plugin system, except that AI can likely deal with minor compatibility breaks if it’s clear what to do.
It’s a similar argument to why Linux device drivers are in-tree. If there are API changes then the AI fixes the callers. Compile-time checks are good because it’s direct feedback to the AI.
Without any evidence to back it up, my hope is that your criticism in a decade will be the equivalent to "Everybody having a mainframe at home? Do we want to waste a whole room in each and every house just for that?".
Having an embedded scripting engine for large programs is nice for simplicity and keeping configuration modular - it would be messy to need to modify source constantly. It’s not an issue of it being difficult to compile something so much as it being pointlessly difficult to maintain.
do you want browser extensions to be able to modify browser code on the fly with regex? that's how you get browser extensions being able to modify browser code on the fly with regex
There are some things that should be configurable and some things that you should not be allowed to configure.
Remember you are not working alone. Different people/companies work differently, but nearly every job has - at least once in a while - a time when someone will be ask your computer reading something on your screen with you. vi vs emacs is bad enough, but at least I know how to do minimal navigation, save, and exit from each (I expect that advanced users of those tools can do much more): there are only so many different systems I can learn though, and it is unfair to make everyone have to learn another. Thus emacs should not allow your to customize your environment with local scripts, either it is in base (as IT installed it), or it isn't allowed! (to my knowledge vi/vim doesn't allow this). Similar for other tools, if it isn't easy for someone who isn't an expert: either your company shouldn't allow it at all, or they need to ensure everyone is encouraged to get training (not forced in case you wouldn't do that anyway - but it should be automatic if you want it and you should know you can get it)
Font size - I've worked with nearly blind people who need huge fonts just to see/read. However this is a compromise and they are worse developers for lack of ability to see as much text as a smaller font enables. Don't get me wrong, they are still great developers, but their eyes are a limit to how good they can be. It is thus reasonable to have a configurable accommodation for that. There are a number of other examples where things can be configurable, but the configurations should be controlled and easy to find. (I'm color blind, if you allow color coding that is fine so long as I can find a color that works for me)
The idea that IT should lock down editor configs treats software development like a factory line where workers should be interchangeable parts. Maybe it is, but I disagree. Software is a craft, and a developer's environment is an extension o fhow they think. If pairing is hard because of someone's custom setup, the answer is to use tools designed for collaboration, not mandating a specific editor config. Check out the code locally.
Personalized tools is how you eliminate friction, it'd be a misallocation of priorities to take that away.
> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken.
And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask. Yes, your diffs appear but they lack filenames. You've added this requirements to the prompt? Ok, filenames are back but they are font size 4, unreadably small. You want them well-seen? next week they become size 54, taking entire screen..
This is not a problem with regular AI development - you review the changes and test them a bit. But doing it day-to-day with no overview is just asking for trouble.
I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible
Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing
Some people even claim that they don't commit the code into source control, only the prompts. The best part about the internet is that you can publish any random shower thought.
Around 2020 I started getting downvoted for predicting that while the most popular programming languages at the time were Python, Java, and JavaScript, or whatever they were, the most popular programming languages in 2035 would be English and Mandarin.
Looks more like 2030, after all. So the downvoters had a point.
Been doing it for the past several weeks. It is no longer correct to say that LLMs can't/don't/won't exercise reasonable aesthetic judgement on the finished product. Immense progress in this area has been made recently.
If you want the model to maintain a certain look and feel, or to preserve the UX in other ways, tell it. Even if it doesn't get it 100% right today, the direction of progress is pretty clear, so you might as well get used to prompting the models accordingly.
This doesn't appear to relate to the conversation at all, because we aren't talking about generating entire products. Is this just generic AI advertising?
I'm responding specifically to the GP's point: 'And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask,' and specifically to your rejoinder ('I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this.')
This is simply not the case when working with Fable-class models. Those who persist in believing it are hopefully very close to retirement.
I'm not 'advocating' anything, just stating a fact.
> "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask.
Surely you don't think that he literally meant to use those seven words as a bullet proof prompt, right?
I will never understand this way of responding literally and pedantically to verbal psudocode. He's leaving it as an exercise to the reader to specify "check that the software works as intended" because he could never possibly properly articulate a perfectly comprehensive QA and validation flow for every piece of software that would satisfy every individual's need.
It's still the same problem. Now instead of checking if the code is correct, you have to check every day if your prompt is still validating the correct features that you expect to work.
yeah, vendor in is the only way to stay sane over time, if you understand the cost of dependencies (and have a reasonable security model). And forking some Python or Go dep on Github and using that instead of the canonical one is pretty ergonomic. I don't know how Rust folks manage with so many dependencies via Cargo - my friend who loves Rust says they are smaller and more "one thing done well" but the complexity of hundreds or thousands of deps just scares me.
My number one problem with Rust (which I otherwise like) is that Cargo allows build-time code execution so I need to run in a sandbox (unergonomic for me) or provide agent instructions to inspect `build.rs` style code in libraries etc. prior to compile. In practice it's easy to build and then ship a dev binary into a sandbox, but it's not so pleasant to build in a sandbox, so I don't want to get build-time pwned. Makes me very unhappy.
Right now, I just have a build server that I ship things to and does lots of build-caching etc. so it's fine, but I would have preferred not to have a system that actively allows build-time thievery of my ~/.ssh
As a maintainer of a devtool which has strived to make itself easily forkable and modifiable, I can see the allure of this line of thinking but I think it's sadly too idealistic.
Engineers using devtools are not so different to an average user in that they just want things to work. Maintaining a devtool is real work; e.g. suppose upstream adds some feature you want but it clashes with something you did downstream. Not in the merge conflict sense but in the UX sense. Do you want to resolve that on every release? Is it just "AI will fix this"? Maybe one day, but as of today agents can do something along the right lines but don't capture my UX sense very well; and if the whole point is hyper-personalization, I want it exactly how I want it.
"Does it seem to work?" is a fine right until it fails when you're doing something important. Do you then stop and go prompt an agent to fix your tooling, and hope it does a good job this time? What if it doesn't do a good job?
Moreover, for devtools which are fundamentally social (i.e. lots of different people looking at the same thing), there's real value in that thing looking the same for everyone. Having a baseline for teaching, auditing, verifying "we are all talking about the same thing" is incredibly valuable and is sometimes where the most value is.
All in all, maybe in some categories of devtools, this hyper personalization is indeed what will happen but it's a long way from being universal.
The idea is that upgrading a devtool is like upgrading a vendored library. It's not something you do automatically or while you're in the middle of doing something else. Usually the AI can fix merge conflicts. If upstream changes are too extensive, you can have the AI rewrite the change entirely.
I think will work better for nice-to-have features that are ultimately disposable if they become too hard to maintain.
> I can see the allure of this line of thinking but I think it's sadly too idealistic.
I think it would be exhausting. Even if nothing broke, upstream UI changes could change your program daily. It makes a lot more sense for pulling changes that are security or bug fixes.
It seems like it would make sense for pulling enhanced functionality with no UI changes, but would you even use the enhanced functionality if you didn't even know it was there?
OTOH, I suppose if you organized your workstream correctly, you would always have previous binaries to fall back on.
Yes, emphatically! I wouldn't be where I am today without tools like Emacs and Linux. This is why I created [pcons](https://pcons.org) because software build tools (like all dev tools) need to be open, transparent, hackable and easy to understand.
I used to be much more of an open source fundamentalist than I am now. For me, it's more about trust than source availability. There are closed source projects that I have high trust in, and there are open source projects that I don't trust at all. A project being open source can increase trust, but not necessarily so.
Regarding personalization, I would much rather use software with strong design principles that's simple, opinionated, and works out of the box with sane defaults. I want to spend my time getting work done, not tweaking settings and adding custom features.
I deeply disagree with the light vs dark framing. I think the real tension between "hacker languages" and "blub languages" is the expectation to modify the language by it's user.
And this is true for dev tools as well. Hackers prefer modifiable environments (such as Emacs), while corporations prefer standard environments (IDEs) to which programmers will adapt.
(As the saying goes: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Might be why Paul Graham preferred founders with non-blub languages after all, nothing to do with Lisp as such.)
But to be able to adapt the environment, one must understand it. Therefore the pull to make it simpler, a set of universal tools, rather than a complicated machine with many features and ease of use through following prescription.
I've worked at a DevTools company and been the CEO of one too. Here's my thoughts:
I agree that they need to be open source. But that makes it really hard to make a successful business. Sure, there are examples of success, but also many examples of successful open source tools never becoming successful companies.
The most famous example is Sendmail (where I worked way back in the day). They took millions in funding and ultimately sold to an infra company, returning pennies on the dollar to their investors.
The difficulty stems from the fact that your customers are developers and operators, and they all think that they don't need you because they are perfectly capable of running the software themselves and adding whatever they need to it. In a lot of cases they are right.
And now, with AI coders, it gets 10 times worse, because they can take your open source and then vibe code a "good enough" version of your commercial product.
I don't know how to square this circle. There are a lot of great dev tools made by people for free for the love of the game. But even those people need to eat.
Some tools have started making licenses that are free for individuals and startups but cost money for profitable companies. That's an interesting strategy but I know some companies won't allow those tools precisely because of their license.
> I don't know how to square this circle. There are a lot of great dev tools made by people for free for the love of the game. But even those people need to eat.
You really don't. If people can get something for free (effectively what OSS means to the average bear these days), they will, and they really don't care if the creator/maintainer can survive. And if that creator/maintainer doesn't, the logic boils down to "what's the replacement for <insert incumbent>?"
IMO, the combination of OSS and "generous free tier" SaaS plans basically nuked the willingness to pay for software, especially dev tools. Folks are just too conditioned to expect stuff to be cheap or free nowadays. Maybe that changes long-term but shrug, who knows.
> Some tools have started making licenses that are free for individuals and startups but cost money for profitable companies.
Ive seen this as well, but at a certain point it just seems like if your code is online, someones either taking it wholesale or recreating core pieces from the spec regardless of any licensing.
Its a tough time to be building OSS if you don't have distribution solved AKA some pedigree from the before times.
> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
Seems like nice syntax sugar to add a `/maintain-fork` command.
I'm not against open source. However, if I were to guess, I think less than 1% of people actually review, let alone modify the open source projects they use. I don't really buy this argument.
I think we're seeing a new modality of openness now with open weights, or being able to modify agents with md files, skills, and so forth.
Before LLMs the barrier to modifying software was much higher - in skill and time investment required.
Now we're getting to the point where any user can say "Claude, I don't like that. Please fix" and have it fixed. Configurability/extensibility can work in some cases, but having source code makes it much more powerful.
I disagree. As if a tool is customized via agents and something goes wrong, it should be the users issue to fix it. Say I want to customize a bank app (or sca tool) to use a nickname instead of my name, if it breaks then who fixes it?
It does not even have to break, you and your LLM can introduce subtle bugs or vulnerabilities to a codebase you are not familiar with and there is a userbase of 1 person to catch this.
You tell the AI what broke and it fixes it, and this is usually a better experience than contacting support. But what if that fails?
This might not generalize beyond developers, or at least not right away. Even if we’re not doing the upgrades ourselves, we know what a merge conflict is, and we’re probably better at telling the AI what went wrong so it can fix it.
These don’t seem like skills that are all that hard to learn for someone who’s interested. Also, merge conflicts an AI can’t deal automatically likely mean something major changed upstream.
There will be jobs helping people who get into more trouble than they can dig themselves out of. And if you can’t afford that, I guess it’s a learning experience.
"Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves."
What happened five years ago? Before that everyone used tools they wrote themselves. I think the answer is nothing happened five years ago and everyone still uses tools they wrote themselves.
A bit idealistic for the crowd here but has some good points.
The other day I wanted to build personal apps for my Kobo device. It has a single ~800Mhz core and 512 MB of RAM, probably eight times less than a rasbperry pi, but runs a Linux.
I wanted to break free from watching my laptop screen for long Claude sessions partially due to degrading eyesight and have a sidekick for approvals streamed to the Kobo. Apart from the Claude and Codex permissions sidekick done via hooks, I ended up building an entire SDK, an HN client, an RSS discovery & reader and an audiobook generator using deep research and ElevenLabs API all running on it.
Anyone using an LLM can now personalize it for their own Kobo device, which might have some nuances over my Clara BW. Significantly less work I hope than doing it all from scratch even with a coding agent.
Like everything else, modifying code of open-source tools has its cons and pros. The biggest advantage is of course an ability to customize the tool exactly to your needs. The problem is that it makes patching and upgrading impossible. This is the reason plugins exist - they do not break ability to patch the host product. So, if customization cannot be avoided even at the cost of losing ability to patch/upgrade - that would definitely work. Otherwise, plugins is probably the best approach.
You write as if they have an ulterior motive to try to trigger your FOMO to keep you proactively burning CPU cycles and AI tokens, just in case something might have changed while you were sleeping.
"Lather, rinse, repeat." Some things never change.
I think there is an argument to be made for how this benefits projects too, like if you want distribution then be as unencumbered as possible.
I've been making a couple little utils like a Clock for AI with an open public endpoint [https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock], a text file sampler [https://github.com/firasd/vblinds] and I was noticing the MIT license seems too encumbered with the requirement to keep crediting authors downstream so I used the 'Unlicense' public domain license
(CC-0 seems to be side-eyed by open source orgs cause it preserves patent rights)
In the spirit of open source devtools & personalized software, check out my digital garden / monorepo I've been working on for 5years! For self-hosting NextJS on k8s & related infra like cnpg.
Everything is now open-source by default. All features are replicable. I don’t really care that much any more that tools need to be OSS because I can make my copies when I want. And I do when I so desire.
Well we can go a step further and say Devtools must not be VC funded too :) Till date, the best and greatest dev tools I've used have not been influenced by VC decisions.
Agreed, i forked a devtool (vibe-kanban) months ago for my own use but keeping up with upstream was a significant burden even with LLMs. The benefit of a well designed plugin system in the devtool is not only to allow sharing of customizations, but also to make users' private customizations cheaper to maintain.
Open-sourced doesnt have to be free either. There's always the very good GNU Affero General Public License 3 (AGPL-3) and others. I think most developers want open-source for transparency. We want to know what we are downloading.
AGPL software is in practice always gratis, because anyone who has a copy can post it on the internet where anyone can download it. The monetization benefit of AGPL is that it makes it significantly more annoying (but by no means impossible) for IaaS providers to sell managed hosting for the software without making a separate commercial agreement with the copyright holder. This usually isn't relevant to dev tools that users run on their own machines.
So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt.
That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthinking an MIT from AGPL license switch for my own project Ouijit (shill time: https://ouijit.com). Its feels a little counterintuitive since AGPL encourages more open source downstream, but at the same time if I have solved some problem other agent harness devs are curious about, I just want them to take the solution without worrying about paying it back/forward.
FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to Anthropic with a single prompt? It’s a strange new world we live in.
On the website: you’re right. I have some side-by-side diff examples I want to turn into a website. I am just short on hours in the day. My real goal is to make the tool compelling enough that I can convince my colleagues that we should build it into Shelley. :)
Website not even needed! Janky terminal screenshot in the repo would have been good enough for me lol.
On another note, the reason I was perusing the blog was because I was curious about more of how exe handles review/quality/testing because you mentioned there being no code review in another post about stripe billings (maybe a different author). So consider this a casual request for more content on reducing delivery bottlenecks :)
> The result is that software that can be personalized doesn’t need a plugin system or a config file.
Yes, please make me rebuild my software to change an API endpoint or port number. It's a wonderful use of time and electricity to build and spin up agents to fix the inevitable problems with building software. Instead of changing a string in configuration file.
(/s if not obvious).
Configuration and plugin systems exist for a good reason: software should be reconfigurable and modular without requiring the wholesale replacement of the original. Even if the code is open source, there are good reasons to move logic and data out of tree and into config or plugins.
I like the idea of devtools being open source. I also like them to work, and that's what I value more that philosophical purity.
Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on this problem for a while. It's a real problem right now: it sucks to read all this LLM-generated code. It's worthwhile to have an LLM summarize it for you.
The problem with that is this particular problem resists vibe coding. I've talked to a bunch of people who have tried to solve it on the side, and it's all sort of ... ok, but still unsolved.
- As mentioned, it takes a while to run. You can modify your other tools, as described, to smuggle the latency.
- LLMs don't know what you care about, so you have to maintain a list of things that you do care about, which is ever evolving. If you don't give it that, it produces slop.
- If you miss something, it hurts. Another layer of swiss-cheese AI doesn't feel right. If you trust the AI, just ask Claude to summarize its work!
- The summaries feel shareable, but the author of the PR is actually the most tolerate of slop about a PR. Your reviewers definitely don't want to read the output of a vibe-coded tool talking about 60% of your PR. They could ask their own Claude!
So, we're building a version (https://tern.sh), and it's not open source, because we want it to be shareable and hosted and support teams -- all that stuff that makes it work. At the end of the day, I'm not here to maintain my tools. I'm here to use my tools to do the job.
It's a bit ironic to talk about key parts of the toolchain being open source while making black-box, closed source LLM's, controlled by external companies an integral part of all of it.
(Author here.) Open models are really quite good now. I still use oai as my daily but I have been very impressed by qwen/glm/k3/etc when I try them. They are clearly my future.
This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily.
Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.
"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.
Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.
It is crazy how much of the tech industry - one of the biggest industries on Earth - still uses so much volunteer labor. Its crazy because in no other industry would people expect you to not only give away your stuff for free but do it in such a way anyone else can copy your stuff and edit it.
Really? Software engineer and you just started making personalized tools recently?
Emacs has been customizable probably longer than I've been alive. Apart from tinkering with Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ when I was a kid, the first things I made were Ruby scripts as personal tools for various things. Had a personalized Emacs environment 20 years ago. Iterated on some abandoned open source projects. And so on...
I guess congrats on an AI telling you about things that have pretty much always existed.
Hi, author here. FWIW, the only people I coordinated with are my colleagues at exe.dev. Philip wrote a blog post a week ago on the topic too: https://blog.exe.dev/customizing-shelley. In retrospect, I should have sent drafts of this to other people I know thinking about new dev tooling to get their feedback! A bit more private discussion could have let me polish this more.
We are all busy discovering the shape of new tools and norms as our profession has been overturned by LLMs. It is not too surprising similar ideas are floating about. Though I have not seen anything that captured how I now go about personalizing programs, and how I expect it to change our industry. So I wrote this.
Resells OpenClaw? What are you on about? and exe has no markup through their LLM gateway. Maybe educate yourself before talking smack about an awesome little company and platform like exe.dev.
exe.dev has quickly become my platform of choice for hosting, testing, playing and tinkering. I haven't had this much fun playing with a providers offerings since VMs were a new thing. You have no idea what you're talking about here and should do a little research on them first. What you are saying they are, is not that.
Yes exe.dev is the first cloud provider I actually enjoy using. It's easy to manage with just ssh and they give me real disks. The lack of real (EBS is still networked) persistent disks on ec2 instances causes me a lot of pain at $WORK.
"The exe.dev LLM gateway provider source within an LLM integration remains supported. It provides exe.dev-managed access to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks models. Your subscription includes a monthly token allocation, and you can purchase additional tokens at https://exe.dev/user/shelley."
The access to closed platforms is managed according to the docs.
And? It's a convenience for their users (and most users for sure want this) for easy access to frontier closed and also open models (Fireworks). They advise also there is no markup or profit made for them in providing this managed gateway.
I guess I don't understand the OP's point even. Is there some conflict with providing this service and still being passionate about open source? IMV the answer is no.
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.
I'm not habitually modifying the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.
Yeah I think this is changing, fast.
100% agree on "clone X and tell me how it works". I'd also add: "clone X and see how it does Y; use that as design reference for building feature Z" if licenses permit.
On modifying software... I forked codex in ~Dec and had my own lightweight "plan mode" and a few other things. It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated. The models were less good then, and maybe I should have learned some rust first. But it was close. For a less fast-moving codebase it'd have worked, and that was 8mo ago.
On the other hand as someone building in devtools for the first time, I struggle with how to think about this. We're building a cloud agent + sandbox platform, https://boxes.dev - same problem space as the author's product exe.dev. We could open source our client or the whole stack (we've been thinking about it), but we're adding stuff so quickly that anyone customizing would have a hard time with updates. There's also a lot on the hosted side that users couldn't modify unless they self-host.
But I like this vision of a world where software is some fluid thing, and everyone is writing personal mods and building off of others' - basically OSS with forks but where every user (or their agent at least) is engaged with the code.
As an end user, I don't mind if you're building a product with rapidly changing API's out in the open. I'll still use the product if it's useful and deal with the churn. What I DO care about is not having half of that project rug pulled 12 months down the line when your Series B folks decide that this particular money knob needs to be turned up.
So if you want to not piss off your users, that's the way to do it. Build a model where you can actually sustain the product, and no, giving it away on seed and series A round money then rug pulling that gift is not the way to achieve that.
How are you handling the actual provisioning of the agent boxes/VMs? Are you using a specific provider/cloud, or multi-provider? Are there any providers/clouds you've found are better/worse for your use cases?
Asking because I am working on an open/standard protocol/layer for provisioning cloud resources across different providers. One of the ideas is to provide a marketplace of providers/resources via one unified/standard API, which I would allow automatic selection and provisioning of VMs (and other resources) based on price/value/feature/reputation requirements/priorities.
Coder uses terraform providers to do the provisioning. I think that's the correct layer of abstraction, all major providers will be there and can be customized with the modifications needed via various other terraform features.
I've written three different solutions for platforms that solve this standard protocol layer. What has worked for us was deciding to standardize on the Kubernetes API for our services back in 2017, and then from then on, all our providers have provided either a k8s API to interact with resources, or provide a Cluster API for provisioning. For example we have two datacenter VM providers that implement the k8s API and we've been able to swap the providers with no user refactoring, it's a good solution in hindsight with how many people have k8s in their stack.
For the second big feature you're thinking of, we never really go a good solution to this problem, a lot of our workloads are long lived and not necessarily spot instance-able, but it's a very fun routing problem. Most of our need to be in multiple clouds is that we want to heavily separate our customer facing services, and keeping it away from internal workloads that support those customer APIs.
Is this public work? I'd love to take a look. This is my bread and butter.
> On modifying software [..] It was fun and satisfying, but it ended up being a bit of a pain to keep updated.
I don't mean this as a criticism in any way - but the need to keep your changes current is a strong motivation for getting those changes incorporated upstream.
> but the need to keep your changes current is a strong motivation for getting those changes incorporated upstream.
But the cost of contributing changes made by AI is higher: * high chance of the being just rejected because code made by AI, or PR made by AI * so contributing would require carefully preparing a human-made patch (but that becomes much more work than telling an agent to just upgrade my fork) * there is still a high chance for the patch to be rejected or just ignored for months/years, like before
Also, there are much more vibe coded projects which are open source, but the author has no interest in maintaining, so issues/PRs will just be ignored.
I have sent countless small bug fixes even before, to tools that I use that I could dig into when something was off... No big heavy lifting, but plenty of "tinker on your tools" stuff. And I don't think what I did was that special, so maybe the experiences are different?
The current LLM-driven stuff seems to break down the expectations, and now there are a lot of places which just ignore anything I send in (the same tinkers as before), generally, for a while. Though there are some tools that picked up the pace and actually react faster (so YMMV here too).
But there are few things more frustrating as being half-way. Case to point is LM Studio. It's closed source, has bugs (duh!), and there's at least a GitHub issue tracker to report the bugs -- but then by and large nothing happens to those reported things. It's almost worse than not having an issue tracker (then I could justify never to really touch LM Studio again, this way I keep hoping against hope that reports will turn into fixes and thus I keep using and keep reporting...)
The solution for this is to pay open source maintainers for their attention. If I want them to review and merge my bugfix I should attach $1000 to the PR.
This is actually not a bad idea for funding open source software. It used to be that you’d have an author who coded a project and then could fix the occasional bug or two quickly.
Now, we have larger projects where it is rare for one people to have a complete understanding, and the main value is a person to reviewing patches and bugs to make sure the changes align with the larger goals/path for the project. There is little incentive for a maintainer to do this, aside from wanting to limit forks.
Paying for that review might be the way to keep this whole model sustainable.
Opportunity for gh
“Here is my pr I attach x$ payable when it is merged” and allow me to add $ to other prs.
I have been waiting year + for multiple feature in some projects that have open prs and for one I would easily bid 100-200$
Maybe a donate link attached too. The dollars tied to a PR could help set priority of fixes.
That's my biggest gripe with open source software. It's not really the open source part that's bad, but when projects turn into major projects with a substantial user base, I think the owners have an obligation not to delude their users into thinking they have more say than they actually do. Plenty of big projects leave their issue trackers public and have docs that encourage community contribution, yet effectively ignore user submissions unless perhaps someone with a name raises an issue. I completely agree that allowing users to waste their time believing their issue or pull request can make a difference is actually worse than not allowing public submissions in the first place.
I'm not sure why I seem to be in the minority on this. Maybe I've just had bad luck in that most of the issues and PRs I've submitted to open source have been ignored. Hell, I'd prefer a "thanks but no thanks" or even "fuck you" over radio silence. The typical response to this frustration of mine is "just fork the code, bro", which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.
> thrives from having a community.
Does it? I think a lot of software projects which are not as huge as the Linux kernel etc. thrive best with a tight core development team, and not from a "community" if you mean that word beyond "users".
Look at it from the point of view of a maintainer. Not sure if you've ever tried. People want to pull your software towards a million incompatible directions. They write some big patch and then get angry if you don't merge it.
My advice: consult the maintainers first whether they agree with your idea and whether they are open to considering your submission. You still won't have a guarantee that it will be accepted, because that's their final say. But at least you won't spend effort coding up something that they could already tell you they don't want to have in their software.
> which is absurd because forking should be a last resort for software that thrives from having a community.
This is true, of course, but having a community is completely orthogonal to whether software is open or closed source.
The two are correlated which does encourage that mistaken view. Github culture generally blends these two, having an open issue tracker, pull requests etc. as well as the code right there, often with a free license.
But you can very much allow bug reports and feature requests in public while developing proprietary software and you can also very much work on a project alone or with a small group without being open to random patches, contributions or requests and be open source / FLOSS.
The key definitional question is the license, not any of the cultural stuff.
I now have a fork of Ghostty that is kept up to date with AI and automatically triages and then PRs issues. All because I wanted to have a built in settings page instead of a config file I needed to edit. The future of software is custom per user.
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
As someone who way long before the LLM age had small patches accepted in several dozens of projects I've been using, I can assure you that this is just a matter of mentality. All I needed to be able to do that was to stop thinking that "nobody has done it so far, so it must be hard" and just do it. Sometimes I failed, but more often than not it turned out it wasn't hard at all and nobody has done it so far simply because nobody cared enough to attempt it.
> Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother.
Not my experience at all. Usually the only limiting factor is the size of the project. Compiling a web browser on my 7 yo 13" laptop is a miserable experience, but compiling most of the desktop components or utilities is and has always been a breeze and, in my experience with both Debian and Arch, just a matter of grabbing the distro's source package. I even do it on my phone these days.
I expect it's a whole lot easier on Debian and Arch than it is on macOS.
Well, a good OS helps in a multitude of ways. It's somewhat harder to do what we're talking about with proprietary tools anyway.
Ha, yes! A few times I've had a back and forth with Claude about why software X isn't working as I expected it to, with Claude coming up with more and more ludicrous explanations, and in the end I say, "just go and read the code", and it remembers it can do that and goes and does it and then finds the bug, or the weird UX design or whatever. It's really helpful.
Three points:
1) I think that is a really interesting insight. I have never done the above myself, but often I don't "tinker" with things because the amount of energy it would take me to JUST GET IT RUNNING is large, and I might end up borking my own system in doing so.
An LLM in a VM can reasonably and safely completely work out on its own how to run some software. I'd never thought about really doing that as a reflexive thing when I am curious. Good thought.
2) I wonder if this is going to be a bifurcation. Where open source software is looked at far more often than in the past because it can actually be "live" investigated (not just have the code reviewed) with little effort?
3) On the opposite of 2, I wonder how many people are going to start "close sourcing" their software, because previously they could be open source, and rely on the inertia of actually getting it running to be enough to support a consultancy service or whatever. If getting it running is trivial, then maybe I need your service less, I just need the code. Might result in different business models?
> I wonder how many people are going to start "close sourcing" their software, because previously they could be open source, and rely on the inertia of actually getting it running to be enough to support a consultancy service or whatever.
I do think there's a bit of a risk there, actually.
It's not just the consultancy thing - it's the competitive advantage of the software itself.
Used to be that you could release open source safe in the knowledge that few people would extract core parts that they need and discard the rest, or fork the project in another direction, because the friction was too much. Better value for people to contribute to your project directly, which provides a great deal of value in exchange for releasing it in the first place.
Now... if you invent some brilliant new database indexing scheme and release it as open source, I can point my coding agent at your code and have it imitate your new insight in a few minutes.
For some projects that's fine, but for projects that intended to commercialize that's not ideal at all.
So yeah, I do worry about the way coding agents distort the previous incentives for open source projects.
> the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that
Alternately: The collective capability is what makes important lasting changes, but individual capability is still a required building-block to get there.
Much like freedom of speech, come to think of it.
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The canonical example was RMS needing to fix a printer driver bug back before software updates were really a thing. That meant that there was a greater motivation for users to maintain their changes.
Today, with software being an evergreen stack of turtles from the BIOS all the way up the OS to the remote APIs the qpp interacts with, expecting a user to indefinitely maintain their private fork of any software is a really big stretch.
Unless it is a local-only, unmaintained project that doesn't get deployed through a software repository or an app store, I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.
> I think that original vision of open source software is very much the exception and not the rule.
RMS has never supported open source. And never emphasized software repositories or deployment or app stores or whatever. He is a proponent of free software based on ethical motivations, to allow users the freedom to control how their computing is done. It perfectly fits the local-only personal project.
Actually, the harsh reality is that for a large majority it has been an easier way to pirate, nothing else, while feeling entitled to scream at the poor maintainers for not implementing whatever features they needed for yesterday.
What a boringly reductive take.
It's not like hackernews is some amazing bastion of like, optimism and culture and interesting conversation, but surely we can do better than this?
HackerNews, the site when someone posts about their business for developer tooling, there is always a bunch of folks posting links about half implemented alternatives, because who wants to pay for tooling like any other professionals?
This is also completely self inflicted. This is one of the only professions that does not want to pay for their tools and will do anything to get it for free, including building it themselves.
So this is quite unsurprising that open source developers have become this decade's new starving artists asking for donations for their "free software" only for a coding agent to do it for close to $0.
Perhaps, but it is also the way in which LLM providers eat their seed corn. If everyone publishes less because the only one to consume it will be an LLM gives no credit, then LLMs will lose training material over time.
Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time because the maintainers of the projects don’t want AI slop contributions, but now you depend on these changes for your own use so now you’ve created more work for yourself keeping your own fork up to date.
I used AI to help me make a change to a library I use that ended up being a single line of code. The pull request was refused for having a Claude attribution even though it was a single code change that was syntax only with no change in behavior just to make it compatible with an older version of the language they claimed to support (so I considered this incompatibility a bug).
Ended up figuring out a workaround in our application code instead just so we could use the upstream. Still not really worth the effort for most projects even with AI.
In the era of AI slop being bombarded at you from all sides 24/7 I don’t blame them. Gatekeeping is the only way to maintain a semblance of quality (and sanity). Once you let slop in it accumulates at an insane rate. You need zero tolerance or you will be overwhelmed.
> Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time
The linked article has an ambitious solution for that, in the form of this prompt to a coding agent harness:
Maintaining a fork seems trivial for an LLM. Replaying each upstream commit against your fork is exactly what even dumb models can do without issue.
But at the same time LLMs also let you question why you’re using a dependency if it’s causing certain issues for you.
e.g. I got tired of waiting for libghostty to publish a new stable release since the one in March which would have a memory leak fix I reported, so I spent a week of getting LLMs to build my own solid pty/terminal emulator. Now I have my own and frankly I'm in a better position having done it.
That's a ridiculously massive change to our relationship with software projects.
I too built a terminal emulator and I like it, but I wouldn't say it's easy to maintain even with LLMs. The # of edge cases is insane.
The cool thing is that you can use and adapt the tests of all major third party terminal implementations. Come up with your own invariants (brainstorm them with a smart LLM), and now every third-party test either passes, diverges (due to invariant/arch), or diverges (due to product bug).
And even if you aren't that robust about it, terminal apps are the sort of ideal vibe-coded app since, using it daily, you are giving it a constant real world test that uncovers issues to be fixed incrementally.
Is neovim over tmux over ssh glitching? LLM can fix it.
Is codex or claude code overwriting lines in the TUI, maybe due to alt screen, but it also happens in other major terminal apps? LLM can figure out why and whether you can come up with better general architecture to fix it.
Is there behavior you wish you had but no other terminal app supports? LLM can add it.
You can end up with a far better product than what you would find in the wild, and it's a fun sort of work.
> Then you’re maintaining a stack of patches on top of the upstream until the end of time because the maintainers of the projects don’t want AI slop contributions, but now you depend on these changes for your own use so now you’ve created more work for yourself keeping your own fork up to date.
I thought about this but I currently maintain a fork of about ~6 things I use on my own, none of which I have any interest of contributing upstream because it'd be out-of-scope and put a burden on the maintainers that is unrelated to their primary goal. It has been an extremely easy experience with claude to keep those tools up to date on top of upstream.
StGit/Stacked Git is a proven tool for this and has worked wonders, I can literally just ask claude to fetch upstream and reapply stg patches on top and fix each patch if they break in order. I also keep extensive description of the INTENT on the stg patches so claude can easily figure out if something is no longer relevant (ie: somewhat implement by upstream) or where to land the code/hooks. I've added features, reworked how algorithms work (pathfinding related!) and small nits I hit on daily usage.
Even on a very churny upstream (one of the projects the single dev likes to refactor alot) it's still extremely chill and doesn't take more than an hour to get it updated when everything breaks. I can't say i care enough to setup a daily cron like a sibling suggested, but it would likely work just based off of this stg experience.
It's also nice, because some of those were actual bug fixes too which i have contributed back upstream! Maintaining your personalized fork is truly reasonable nowadays.
> even though it was a single code change that was syntax only with no change in behavior just to make it compatible with an older version of the language they claimed to support
It seems like a great stretch to call this "slop".
I agree but it’s their project and their rules. To them I’m just another guy tossing slop over the fence they don’t have time to review in the hig stack of all the other slop.
> I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Still highly dependant on one's access to SOTA AI models (availability and funding). Most people praising LLMs publicly for this sort of use case, are the ones with unlimited access to tokens / AI credits, or simply with a lot of money to burn.
But reality is that between using one's limited employer-sponsored quota of tokens to do their 9-5 business logic coding maintenance job, versus exploring 3rd-party software as end-users, I am sure of which one their managers will prefer.
I believe it will eventually happen, whether with SOTA local models on highly capable local hardware, or super cheap inference APIs... or both.
I've gone back and forth on this.
A couple of years ago LLM prompts really were incredibly cheap and falling in price. OpenAI's own models had fallen in cost by a factor of about 1000x since GPT-3.
They were also cheap because many of the things you might want to do with an LLM took in the order of a few thousands tokens, at most.
Then coding agents happened, and suddenly we had a reason to burn 100,000s or even millions of tokens on a single task. Stuff got expensive!
(Classic Jevon's paradox right there.)
It feels to me like that's trending back down again though. DeepSeek and Kimi are massively less expensive than OpenAI and Anthropic, and almost as useful.
OpenAI dropped the price of Luna by 80% the other day, and it's proving very capable of exploring codebases and generating quite competent code.
So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.
> So I don't think advanced AI that can help debug and maintain software will stay out of the reach of most people for very long.
But then what stops the upstream tools from doing exactly the same thing and getting the same speedups? I've certainly seen AI become a huge boon in my debugging experience for random user reports for example.
FWIW if we are talking about hyper personalized software like the OP, it's going to quickly go beyond "debug and maintain" and towards bigger issues like UX, ergonomics, features etc. And at that point, if the upstream is also being developed you will have differences between your personal visions and upstream
Is the answer at that point "accept whatever AI does"? That to me seems to clash with the entire premise of hyper-personalization which is where your vision is what matters not the AI's. Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?
> Do you really want to get into the game of having opinions on design of every tool you use forever?
Yeap. Most users want someone else to think for them. Not just "something" (AI). Having a vision on what works best (design) is still, for the time being, a human task IMO.
> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
In principle, you should not need the source code: the AI should be able to answer by examining the binaries.
I mostly work with Python, and often coding agents answer questions about dependencies for me just by digging around in the site-packages folder in whatever virtual environment they have access to.
The "clone X and tell me" trick is something I mostly use on my phone - I can answer questions about pretty much any piece of software on GitHub with a regular Claude session, no coding agent needed.
> Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works"
We built a free tool to help with this workflow! Just prepend "ask" to any public github repo and get a chat box to ask questions on it :)
For example: https://askgithub.com/openai/codex
> One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
A corollary is that more people will have eyes on the source code than the original developer(s), so the project can benefit from a broader skill set and set of orientations and priorities than if it were proprietary. Not just on the development front, but hopefully also in security, usability and accessibility
> The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I imagine you are correct that most people historically didn't inspect or modify most tools they use, but most developers I know who have relied on open source software -- even if they didn't contribute directly upstream -- have had the experience of locally patching a small bug or adding a small enhancement to suit a use case, or studying a piece of an open source module as a starting place for their own implementation for some piece of functionality, or doing a cursory scan of a project to make sure it isn't e.g. phoning home, or simply taking a morbidly curious look to see how the sausage is made.
Sure, I'm not a representative sample and it would be great to have some actual numbers on this, but I have observed this among engineers at Fortune 500s and YC startups, but also non-tech businesses as well as at local public utilities and health systems.
Anyway, I agree that LLMs can provide a lot of value here and reduce the friction but I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously because most people didn't have time to read code. It provides value even without developers reading code in the first place, and reading code was historically one of the essential parts of the work
Yeah, due to the friction of maintaining a private fork, I always upstream bug fixes I find where the fix is simpler than a work around. It's just neighborly. I don't it very often, maybe every 2 years? But a lot of other people do so, and it adds up; open source software continues to improve pretty substantially over the years.
And when I'm debugging I read all the code I have access to - certainly glibc pretty often, Python C implementation and C libraries quite often; the Go runtime, if only for the education, etc. It's not often I need to read the kernel implementation, except sometimes for networking protocols where it's also educational. I have found over my career that reading excellent code is as important to the quality of my code as writing code and iterating on it to make it good.
> I question the narrative that open source wasn't providing much value previously
Don't get me wrong, I've been a strong advocate for the benefits of open source for decades. I think it's delivered enormous value, and most of the top valued companies in the world today wouldn't exist without open source!
What's new now is that the end user inspection and modification benefits are feeling a lot more material for a lot more people than before.
No worries, I thought so, and agree with your point -- I'm a fan of your work and datasette historically was something I leaned on often at work and in personal projects. I have read some interpretations of recent developments that misunderstand what programmers and mathematicians do and have done, so was filling in the gaps in what you wrote to speak to some of those
I'm grateful for the work you've done!
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
A lot of modern open source software is often written in dependency heavy languages.
So to do a "proper" examination, by definition you need to consider the dependencies as well as the core code itself. We all know how supply-chain attacks are on the rise.
This is in my opinion the single most important revolution that will come from llm in the dev space. Not vibecoding or replacing entire teams.
Its this and also the ability for non dev to create their own little tools (for productivity, entertainment, family life, whichever).
I think they will put back the "personal" in personal computing
> Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
Hell, even when I can justify the time commitment for that, I can't justify the ongoing maintenance burden of fixing up my patches to work on the latest version every release or major security fix...
Do you verify the reply on how Z works too?
I agree that devtools should be open source, but... I very much disagree with the premise that no tools should have config files, options, or plugin systems, and instead when you want to change something like your text editor's font size, you should have an LLM download the code, change the hard-coded value, and rebuild it.
That's just so inefficient and wasteful. Assuming a world in which LLMs do most of the coding work, do we want to burn electricity having the LLM build an options dialog or config file parser once, or do we want to burn electricity millions of times as users want to change any little thing about the software they use?
I really hope what you should expect is my answer to that question isn't controversial.
Having an LLM do bespoke customizations that are unlikely to be interesting to other people? Great, sure. But adding a generally-useful feature to a piece of software, but not caring to try to upstream it? Lame. Lame, lame, lame.
I completely agree - we've seen that tools with plugins are really scalable and then allow the better plugins to be folded back into the main tool where they become popular. I've taken that approach with my own dev tools that I've created.
Even pre-LLM this is how suckless tools work, I actually don’t much mind having to edit a variable in a header and recompile when you make a config change.
https://dwm.suckless.org/customisation/
Only for trivial programs - I don't mind running make on a 2500 line C program, I would mind having to recompile LLVM or Firefox.
Suckless software does have config files they just have a “.h” extension
Having your config file be a c header and needing a recompile is different than not having any user accessible configuration
Which is why many of us happily ignore their existence.
The real waste is that tweaking a config setting is a one-and-done deal, I don't want my tools to be side projects that require maintaining their build chains and frequent customization even if an LLM is doing the heavy-lifting.
Updating a constant versus a config parameter isn’t all that different if the build is fast.
I do think modularity will remain important because it makes merge conflicts less likely, and a system with good modularity could look a lot like a plugin system, except that AI can likely deal with minor compatibility breaks if it’s clear what to do.
It’s a similar argument to why Linux device drivers are in-tree. If there are API changes then the AI fixes the callers. Compile-time checks are good because it’s direct feedback to the AI.
Without any evidence to back it up, my hope is that your criticism in a decade will be the equivalent to "Everybody having a mainframe at home? Do we want to waste a whole room in each and every house just for that?".
Having an embedded scripting engine for large programs is nice for simplicity and keeping configuration modular - it would be messy to need to modify source constantly. It’s not an issue of it being difficult to compile something so much as it being pointlessly difficult to maintain.
do you want browser extensions to be able to modify browser code on the fly with regex? that's how you get browser extensions being able to modify browser code on the fly with regex
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/networking/mozilla-cha...
There are some things that should be configurable and some things that you should not be allowed to configure.
Remember you are not working alone. Different people/companies work differently, but nearly every job has - at least once in a while - a time when someone will be ask your computer reading something on your screen with you. vi vs emacs is bad enough, but at least I know how to do minimal navigation, save, and exit from each (I expect that advanced users of those tools can do much more): there are only so many different systems I can learn though, and it is unfair to make everyone have to learn another. Thus emacs should not allow your to customize your environment with local scripts, either it is in base (as IT installed it), or it isn't allowed! (to my knowledge vi/vim doesn't allow this). Similar for other tools, if it isn't easy for someone who isn't an expert: either your company shouldn't allow it at all, or they need to ensure everyone is encouraged to get training (not forced in case you wouldn't do that anyway - but it should be automatic if you want it and you should know you can get it)
Font size - I've worked with nearly blind people who need huge fonts just to see/read. However this is a compromise and they are worse developers for lack of ability to see as much text as a smaller font enables. Don't get me wrong, they are still great developers, but their eyes are a limit to how good they can be. It is thus reasonable to have a configurable accommodation for that. There are a number of other examples where things can be configurable, but the configurations should be controlled and easy to find. (I'm color blind, if you allow color coding that is fine so long as I can find a color that works for me)
LLMs fix all of these things, in the (rare) instances where existing tooling does not.
The idea that IT should lock down editor configs treats software development like a factory line where workers should be interchangeable parts. Maybe it is, but I disagree. Software is a craft, and a developer's environment is an extension o fhow they think. If pairing is hard because of someone's custom setup, the answer is to use tools designed for collaboration, not mandating a specific editor config. Check out the code locally.
Personalized tools is how you eliminate friction, it'd be a misallocation of priorities to take that away.
As an side, vim definitely allows user scripts.
> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken.
And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask. Yes, your diffs appear but they lack filenames. You've added this requirements to the prompt? Ok, filenames are back but they are font size 4, unreadably small. You want them well-seen? next week they become size 54, taking entire screen.. This is not a problem with regular AI development - you review the changes and test them a bit. But doing it day-to-day with no overview is just asking for trouble.
I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this, its one of those things that you say because it sounds modern and up to date, and makes for a good sounding blogpost. The actual reality of any of what they're talking about is absolutely terrible
Even just the cost of this would be a disaster, especially once everything goes to token based pricing
Some people even claim that they don't commit the code into source control, only the prompts. The best part about the internet is that you can publish any random shower thought.
I don't even commit the prompts. I just commit the one prompt which says "do what the customer wants. ask when more information is required."
Around 2020 I started getting downvoted for predicting that while the most popular programming languages at the time were Python, Java, and JavaScript, or whatever they were, the most popular programming languages in 2035 would be English and Mandarin.
Looks more like 2030, after all. So the downvoters had a point.
Been doing it for the past several weeks. It is no longer correct to say that LLMs can't/don't/won't exercise reasonable aesthetic judgement on the finished product. Immense progress in this area has been made recently.
If you want the model to maintain a certain look and feel, or to preserve the UX in other ways, tell it. Even if it doesn't get it 100% right today, the direction of progress is pretty clear, so you might as well get used to prompting the models accordingly.
This doesn't appear to relate to the conversation at all, because we aren't talking about generating entire products. Is this just generic AI advertising?
I'm responding specifically to the GP's point: 'And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask,' and specifically to your rejoinder ('I suspect the people advocating for this don't actually do this.')
This is simply not the case when working with Fable-class models. Those who persist in believing it are hopefully very close to retirement.
I'm not 'advocating' anything, just stating a fact.
> "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask.
Surely you don't think that he literally meant to use those seven words as a bullet proof prompt, right?
I will never understand this way of responding literally and pedantically to verbal psudocode. He's leaving it as an exercise to the reader to specify "check that the software works as intended" because he could never possibly properly articulate a perfectly comprehensive QA and validation flow for every piece of software that would satisfy every individual's need.
It's still the same problem. Now instead of checking if the code is correct, you have to check every day if your prompt is still validating the correct features that you expect to work.
I don’t auto-rebase but I definitely vendor in and choose to update on my own cadence.
yeah, vendor in is the only way to stay sane over time, if you understand the cost of dependencies (and have a reasonable security model). And forking some Python or Go dep on Github and using that instead of the canonical one is pretty ergonomic. I don't know how Rust folks manage with so many dependencies via Cargo - my friend who loves Rust says they are smaller and more "one thing done well" but the complexity of hundreds or thousands of deps just scares me.
My number one problem with Rust (which I otherwise like) is that Cargo allows build-time code execution so I need to run in a sandbox (unergonomic for me) or provide agent instructions to inspect `build.rs` style code in libraries etc. prior to compile. In practice it's easy to build and then ship a dev binary into a sandbox, but it's not so pleasant to build in a sandbox, so I don't want to get build-time pwned. Makes me very unhappy.
Right now, I just have a build server that I ship things to and does lots of build-caching etc. so it's fine, but I would have preferred not to have a system that actively allows build-time thievery of my ~/.ssh
> This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor...
But, at least you know the cost up-front.
Oh, wait...
As a maintainer of a devtool which has strived to make itself easily forkable and modifiable, I can see the allure of this line of thinking but I think it's sadly too idealistic.
Engineers using devtools are not so different to an average user in that they just want things to work. Maintaining a devtool is real work; e.g. suppose upstream adds some feature you want but it clashes with something you did downstream. Not in the merge conflict sense but in the UX sense. Do you want to resolve that on every release? Is it just "AI will fix this"? Maybe one day, but as of today agents can do something along the right lines but don't capture my UX sense very well; and if the whole point is hyper-personalization, I want it exactly how I want it.
"Does it seem to work?" is a fine right until it fails when you're doing something important. Do you then stop and go prompt an agent to fix your tooling, and hope it does a good job this time? What if it doesn't do a good job?
Moreover, for devtools which are fundamentally social (i.e. lots of different people looking at the same thing), there's real value in that thing looking the same for everyone. Having a baseline for teaching, auditing, verifying "we are all talking about the same thing" is incredibly valuable and is sometimes where the most value is.
All in all, maybe in some categories of devtools, this hyper personalization is indeed what will happen but it's a long way from being universal.
The idea is that upgrading a devtool is like upgrading a vendored library. It's not something you do automatically or while you're in the middle of doing something else. Usually the AI can fix merge conflicts. If upstream changes are too extensive, you can have the AI rewrite the change entirely.
I think will work better for nice-to-have features that are ultimately disposable if they become too hard to maintain.
> I can see the allure of this line of thinking but I think it's sadly too idealistic.
I think it would be exhausting. Even if nothing broke, upstream UI changes could change your program daily. It makes a lot more sense for pulling changes that are security or bug fixes.
It seems like it would make sense for pulling enhanced functionality with no UI changes, but would you even use the enhanced functionality if you didn't even know it was there?
OTOH, I suppose if you organized your workstream correctly, you would always have previous binaries to fall back on.
Yes, emphatically! I wouldn't be where I am today without tools like Emacs and Linux. This is why I created [pcons](https://pcons.org) because software build tools (like all dev tools) need to be open, transparent, hackable and easy to understand.
I used to be much more of an open source fundamentalist than I am now. For me, it's more about trust than source availability. There are closed source projects that I have high trust in, and there are open source projects that I don't trust at all. A project being open source can increase trust, but not necessarily so.
Regarding personalization, I would much rather use software with strong design principles that's simple, opinionated, and works out of the box with sane defaults. I want to spend my time getting work done, not tweaking settings and adding custom features.
Some time ago, there was a comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48849015
I deeply disagree with the light vs dark framing. I think the real tension between "hacker languages" and "blub languages" is the expectation to modify the language by it's user.
And this is true for dev tools as well. Hackers prefer modifiable environments (such as Emacs), while corporations prefer standard environments (IDEs) to which programmers will adapt.
(As the saying goes: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Might be why Paul Graham preferred founders with non-blub languages after all, nothing to do with Lisp as such.)
But to be able to adapt the environment, one must understand it. Therefore the pull to make it simpler, a set of universal tools, rather than a complicated machine with many features and ease of use through following prescription.
I've worked at a DevTools company and been the CEO of one too. Here's my thoughts:
I agree that they need to be open source. But that makes it really hard to make a successful business. Sure, there are examples of success, but also many examples of successful open source tools never becoming successful companies.
The most famous example is Sendmail (where I worked way back in the day). They took millions in funding and ultimately sold to an infra company, returning pennies on the dollar to their investors.
The difficulty stems from the fact that your customers are developers and operators, and they all think that they don't need you because they are perfectly capable of running the software themselves and adding whatever they need to it. In a lot of cases they are right.
And now, with AI coders, it gets 10 times worse, because they can take your open source and then vibe code a "good enough" version of your commercial product.
I don't know how to square this circle. There are a lot of great dev tools made by people for free for the love of the game. But even those people need to eat.
Some tools have started making licenses that are free for individuals and startups but cost money for profitable companies. That's an interesting strategy but I know some companies won't allow those tools precisely because of their license.
> I don't know how to square this circle. There are a lot of great dev tools made by people for free for the love of the game. But even those people need to eat.
You really don't. If people can get something for free (effectively what OSS means to the average bear these days), they will, and they really don't care if the creator/maintainer can survive. And if that creator/maintainer doesn't, the logic boils down to "what's the replacement for <insert incumbent>?"
IMO, the combination of OSS and "generous free tier" SaaS plans basically nuked the willingness to pay for software, especially dev tools. Folks are just too conditioned to expect stuff to be cheap or free nowadays. Maybe that changes long-term but shrug, who knows.
> Some tools have started making licenses that are free for individuals and startups but cost money for profitable companies.
Ive seen this as well, but at a certain point it just seems like if your code is online, someones either taking it wholesale or recreating core pieces from the spec regardless of any licensing.
Its a tough time to be building OSS if you don't have distribution solved AKA some pedigree from the before times.
> Its a tough time to be building OSS if you don't have distribution solved AKA some pedigree from the before times.
I think this has always been true, but you're right, it's much more pronounced now.
Separately, JetBrains's revenue grew 25%: https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/annualreport-2026/
But back to OP, for this prompt:
> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
Seems like nice syntax sugar to add a `/maintain-fork` command.
I'm not against open source. However, if I were to guess, I think less than 1% of people actually review, let alone modify the open source projects they use. I don't really buy this argument.
I think we're seeing a new modality of openness now with open weights, or being able to modify agents with md files, skills, and so forth.
Before LLMs the barrier to modifying software was much higher - in skill and time investment required.
Now we're getting to the point where any user can say "Claude, I don't like that. Please fix" and have it fixed. Configurability/extensibility can work in some cases, but having source code makes it much more powerful.
I think it's pretty common in software companies to maintain own custom fork of an open-source tool/library.
I disagree. As if a tool is customized via agents and something goes wrong, it should be the users issue to fix it. Say I want to customize a bank app (or sca tool) to use a nickname instead of my name, if it breaks then who fixes it?
It does not even have to break, you and your LLM can introduce subtle bugs or vulnerabilities to a codebase you are not familiar with and there is a userbase of 1 person to catch this.
You tell the AI what broke and it fixes it, and this is usually a better experience than contacting support. But what if that fails?
This might not generalize beyond developers, or at least not right away. Even if we’re not doing the upgrades ourselves, we know what a merge conflict is, and we’re probably better at telling the AI what went wrong so it can fix it.
These don’t seem like skills that are all that hard to learn for someone who’s interested. Also, merge conflicts an AI can’t deal automatically likely mean something major changed upstream.
There will be jobs helping people who get into more trouble than they can dig themselves out of. And if you can’t afford that, I guess it’s a learning experience.
>How to Personalize Software
I've seen https://v-it.org/ here on hackernews. Same idea, different wording.
"Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves."
What happened five years ago? Before that everyone used tools they wrote themselves. I think the answer is nothing happened five years ago and everyone still uses tools they wrote themselves.
> What happened five years ago?
Apparently the dude found some new acquaintances.
A bit idealistic for the crowd here but has some good points.
The other day I wanted to build personal apps for my Kobo device. It has a single ~800Mhz core and 512 MB of RAM, probably eight times less than a rasbperry pi, but runs a Linux.
I wanted to break free from watching my laptop screen for long Claude sessions partially due to degrading eyesight and have a sidekick for approvals streamed to the Kobo. Apart from the Claude and Codex permissions sidekick done via hooks, I ended up building an entire SDK, an HN client, an RSS discovery & reader and an audiobook generator using deep research and ElevenLabs API all running on it.
Anyone using an LLM can now personalize it for their own Kobo device, which might have some nuances over my Clara BW. Significantly less work I hope than doing it all from scratch even with a coding agent.
https://github.com/BandarLabs/Cobalt
Like everything else, modifying code of open-source tools has its cons and pros. The biggest advantage is of course an ability to customize the tool exactly to your needs. The problem is that it makes patching and upgrading impossible. This is the reason plugins exist - they do not break ability to patch the host product. So, if customization cannot be avoided even at the cost of losing ability to patch/upgrade - that would definitely work. Otherwise, plugins is probably the best approach.
exe dev is a VC-funded company reselling open source software.
Everyone's making cash from your open source code except you.
You write as if they have an ulterior motive to try to trigger your FOMO to keep you proactively burning CPU cycles and AI tokens, just in case something might have changed while you were sleeping.
"Lather, rinse, repeat." Some things never change.
I think there is an argument to be made for how this benefits projects too, like if you want distribution then be as unencumbered as possible.
I've been making a couple little utils like a Clock for AI with an open public endpoint [https://github.com/firasd/mcpclock], a text file sampler [https://github.com/firasd/vblinds] and I was noticing the MIT license seems too encumbered with the requirement to keep crediting authors downstream so I used the 'Unlicense' public domain license
(CC-0 seems to be side-eyed by open source orgs cause it preserves patent rights)
In the spirit of open source devtools & personalized software, check out my digital garden / monorepo I've been working on for 5years! For self-hosting NextJS on k8s & related infra like cnpg.
https://peat.eth.demokluster.com https://peat.eth.limo https://peat.eth.link
git clone https://peat.eth.demokluster.com/peat0.git
(webpage itself incl ro-git is hosted/mirrored over IPFS/ENS)
I think this became aparent with agentic coding CLIs. In my company, it was not encouraged to use claude code because they haven't open sourced it yet
LLMs make things easier but can we not advocate for making them a dependency to configure our tools?
Even open weight models aren't fully open source. It's basically like having the back end binary but not the source code.
Use em to make your life easier but I'd rather not we normalize LLMs becoming the primary way we interact with open source software.
I like using exe but I’m not sure what to feel about this if exe itself isnt open source. Granted, their agent is OSS, but still feels somewhat ironic
Everything is now open-source by default. All features are replicable. I don’t really care that much any more that tools need to be OSS because I can make my copies when I want. And I do when I so desire.
Your feature page is your source code.
Good point, but extensibility != OSS though.
JetBrains and Claude/ChatGPT are not open source.
I think we would like them to be ... but ...
Well we can go a step further and say Devtools must not be VC funded too :) Till date, the best and greatest dev tools I've used have not been influenced by VC decisions.
I like the idea but I think manually editing source code is a bit too extreme. I’d rather have a plugin system or make the config scriptable.
Agreed, i forked a devtool (vibe-kanban) months ago for my own use but keeping up with upstream was a significant burden even with LLMs. The benefit of a well designed plugin system in the devtool is not only to allow sharing of customizations, but also to make users' private customizations cheaper to maintain.
Open-sourced doesnt have to be free either. There's always the very good GNU Affero General Public License 3 (AGPL-3) and others. I think most developers want open-source for transparency. We want to know what we are downloading.
AGPL software is in practice always gratis, because anyone who has a copy can post it on the internet where anyone can download it. The monetization benefit of AGPL is that it makes it significantly more annoying (but by no means impossible) for IaaS providers to sell managed hosting for the software without making a separate commercial agreement with the copyright holder. This usually isn't relevant to dev tools that users run on their own machines.
Devtools for open source must be open source, but I see no reason to give any shits what corporations use.
And we live in capitalism, where making money is not optional.
The models are dev tools ;)
So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt.
That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthinking an MIT from AGPL license switch for my own project Ouijit (shill time: https://ouijit.com). Its feels a little counterintuitive since AGPL encourages more open source downstream, but at the same time if I have solved some problem other agent harness devs are curious about, I just want them to take the solution without worrying about paying it back/forward.
(Author here.)
FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to Anthropic with a single prompt? It’s a strange new world we live in.
On the website: you’re right. I have some side-by-side diff examples I want to turn into a website. I am just short on hours in the day. My real goal is to make the tool compelling enough that I can convince my colleagues that we should build it into Shelley. :)
Website not even needed! Janky terminal screenshot in the repo would have been good enough for me lol.
On another note, the reason I was perusing the blog was because I was curious about more of how exe handles review/quality/testing because you mentioned there being no code review in another post about stripe billings (maybe a different author). So consider this a casual request for more content on reducing delivery bottlenecks :)
exe.dev is NOT open source. Funny
> The result is that software that can be personalized doesn’t need a plugin system or a config file.
Yes, please make me rebuild my software to change an API endpoint or port number. It's a wonderful use of time and electricity to build and spin up agents to fix the inevitable problems with building software. Instead of changing a string in configuration file.
(/s if not obvious).
Configuration and plugin systems exist for a good reason: software should be reconfigurable and modular without requiring the wholesale replacement of the original. Even if the code is open source, there are good reasons to move logic and data out of tree and into config or plugins.
Si
I like the idea of devtools being open source. I also like them to work, and that's what I value more that philosophical purity.
Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on this problem for a while. It's a real problem right now: it sucks to read all this LLM-generated code. It's worthwhile to have an LLM summarize it for you.
The problem with that is this particular problem resists vibe coding. I've talked to a bunch of people who have tried to solve it on the side, and it's all sort of ... ok, but still unsolved.
- As mentioned, it takes a while to run. You can modify your other tools, as described, to smuggle the latency.
- LLMs don't know what you care about, so you have to maintain a list of things that you do care about, which is ever evolving. If you don't give it that, it produces slop.
- If you miss something, it hurts. Another layer of swiss-cheese AI doesn't feel right. If you trust the AI, just ask Claude to summarize its work!
- The summaries feel shareable, but the author of the PR is actually the most tolerate of slop about a PR. Your reviewers definitely don't want to read the output of a vibe-coded tool talking about 60% of your PR. They could ask their own Claude!
So, we're building a version (https://tern.sh), and it's not open source, because we want it to be shareable and hosted and support teams -- all that stuff that makes it work. At the end of the day, I'm not here to maintain my tools. I'm here to use my tools to do the job.
It's a bit ironic to talk about key parts of the toolchain being open source while making black-box, closed source LLM's, controlled by external companies an integral part of all of it.
(Author here.) Open models are really quite good now. I still use oai as my daily but I have been very impressed by qwen/glm/k3/etc when I try them. They are clearly my future.
This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily.
Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.
"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.
Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.
> Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it.
I've been paid to produce FLOSS for quite a few years and I know plenty of people who did too. I did not realize we are such unicorns...
It is crazy how much of the tech industry - one of the biggest industries on Earth - still uses so much volunteer labor. Its crazy because in no other industry would people expect you to not only give away your stuff for free but do it in such a way anyone else can copy your stuff and edit it.
Torvalds got RedHat and VA Linux stock options and probably has a very good contract with the Linux Foundation.
I earn income selling copies of free/libre/open source software. Other people could too, if they tried, but they don't.
Really? Software engineer and you just started making personalized tools recently?
Emacs has been customizable probably longer than I've been alive. Apart from tinkering with Basic, Delphi and Visual C++ when I was a kid, the first things I made were Ruby scripts as personal tools for various things. Had a personalized Emacs environment 20 years ago. Iterated on some abandoned open source projects. And so on...
I guess congrats on an AI telling you about things that have pretty much always existed.
Hi, author here. The entire second paragraph of my blog post is dedicated to the question you asked. There is really nothing more I can add.
Company that resells openclaw and closed providers preaches about open source.
The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week.
Problem is, 99.99% of people (including developers) do not need "personalized" software, unless you mean Emacs style.
> The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week.
I agree with you.
They are manipulating public opinion, fooling users.
Hi, author here. FWIW, the only people I coordinated with are my colleagues at exe.dev. Philip wrote a blog post a week ago on the topic too: https://blog.exe.dev/customizing-shelley. In retrospect, I should have sent drafts of this to other people I know thinking about new dev tooling to get their feedback! A bit more private discussion could have let me polish this more.
We are all busy discovering the shape of new tools and norms as our profession has been overturned by LLMs. It is not too surprising similar ideas are floating about. Though I have not seen anything that captured how I now go about personalizing programs, and how I expect it to change our industry. So I wrote this.
exe.dev haters abound, apparently
Resells OpenClaw? What are you on about? and exe has no markup through their LLM gateway. Maybe educate yourself before talking smack about an awesome little company and platform like exe.dev.
exe.dev has quickly become my platform of choice for hosting, testing, playing and tinkering. I haven't had this much fun playing with a providers offerings since VMs were a new thing. You have no idea what you're talking about here and should do a little research on them first. What you are saying they are, is not that.
Yes exe.dev is the first cloud provider I actually enjoy using. It's easy to manage with just ssh and they give me real disks. The lack of real (EBS is still networked) persistent disks on ec2 instances causes me a lot of pain at $WORK.
https://exe.dev/docs/shelley/llm-gateway
"The exe.dev LLM gateway provider source within an LLM integration remains supported. It provides exe.dev-managed access to Anthropic, OpenAI, and Fireworks models. Your subscription includes a monthly token allocation, and you can purchase additional tokens at https://exe.dev/user/shelley."
The access to closed platforms is managed according to the docs.
You don't need to use the LLM integration at all if you choose not to and even without it, it's a lovely service.
I've used the LLM only a few times to make a few sysadmin tasks easier that I could have easily done myself.
And? It's a convenience for their users (and most users for sure want this) for easy access to frontier closed and also open models (Fireworks). They advise also there is no markup or profit made for them in providing this managed gateway.
I guess I don't understand the OP's point even. Is there some conflict with providing this service and still being passionate about open source? IMV the answer is no.
Their main software product, Shelley, is open source: https://github.com/boldsoftware/shelley