According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.
Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don’t fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.
Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.
Archive: http://archive.today/sgl5M
I think this is the crux of it. I’ve experimented with getting AI to fix things, create code blocks. It’s really impressive what it can do.
Except, yeah, the code is an utter mess. On the surface it looks good, but when you dig into it it’s totally unmaintainable.
I got it to write some Grok patterns for some logging software, mostly because there were so many variants on logs from some piece of software that it would have been a nightmare to do it all manually without missing something (and I’m lazy and wanted to see if it could be used for this).
It did it and they work (after a few revisions). However it has created a separate pattern for every little variation. If I’d done it by hand I would have used more complex patterns, but less of them. As a result, any tiny little problem requires changing about four different patterns.