Comment by skybrian
2 months ago
We are seeing a lot of vibe-coded software primarily for one person. (See all the side projects Simon Willison does.)
I wonder if this will lead to more "forks for one person" where you know of open source software that's close to what you want, except for one thing, so you point a coding agent at it.
re: forks for one person
I've recently started to contribute to open source, mostly just to add some tiny feature or such
I did not realise before this that getting your changes upstreamed can take a long time. Now I have even more respect for the likes of Asahi Linux. The code reviews usually improve the change a lot but it's not like coding at a company where best case you are able to get multiple changes deployed a day on repos your team does not even own.
But I feel it's worth the effort. For as long as my changes are not upstreamed I can keep using the forked version or just tolerate not being able to do something.
But the major issue I keep running into is how the build setup is painful. This is where Nix really comes to the rescue though. I can import the nixpkgs setup for the given project, point it to my forl/branch, and rebuild the software into my cachix for use in dev shells and containers.
I wish more people used nix. I would love to see it getting adopted as a backend for other package managers. Just maintaing a binary cache for your distro and it would be more or less the same.
But I suppose there are arguments against a monoculture as well.