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Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue (www.404media.co)

submitted 5 days ago by tonytins@pawb.social to c/foss@beehaw.org

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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

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[–] chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS

"Monetize direct user engagement", does that mean their argument is that AI makes it so people don't need to pay devs to handhold them through using very user unfriendly software?

[–] eltoukan@jlai.lu 9 points 5 days ago

They give the example of Tailwind CSS, who sell UI blocks/kits and templates. I think that sounds like more added value than just pay me to help you use my software.

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwinds—an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwinds is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwinds head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework.

Even for projects that don't advertise commercial products, I can believe that not needing to leave the chat/IDE to do anything leads to less traffic on GitHub etc, which is where the donate buttons are for ex.