Comment by cluckindan
2 days ago
And this is why AI coding will eventually degrade into a mess. Enjoy it while it lasts.
AI eats up users caring about $company which makes library, library degrades because nobody is paying, $company goes insolvent, library goes unmaintained and eventually defunct, AI still tries to use it.
Vibe coding with libraries is a fad that is destined to die.
Vibe coding your own libraries will result in million line codebases nobody understands.
Nothing about either is sustainable, it’s all optics and optics will come crashing down eventually.
That's presuming libraries need companies backing them to continue to work. That's a bad state of things in the first place.
That's presuming humans don't need money to feed themselves and continue to work.
That's neither here, nor there.
AI is destined to destroy software industry, but not itself.
Software does not decay by itself (it's literally the whole point of using digital media over analog). Libraries do not "degrade". "Bit rot" is an illusion, a fictitious force like centrifugal force in Newtonian dynamics, representing changes that happen not to a program, but to everything else around it.
The current degree of churn in webshit ecosystem (whose anti-patterns are increasingly seeping in and infecting other software ecosystems) is not a natural state of things. Reducing churn won't kill existing software - on the contrary, it'll just let it continue to work without changes.
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That is one take and certainly possible and negative but I think people create libraries for different reasons.
There are people who will use AI (out of their own pocket for trivial costs) to build a library and maintain it simply out of the passion, ego, and perhaps some technical clout.
That's the same with OSS libraries in-general. Some are maintained at-cost, others are run like a business where the founders try to break even.
I don't see enough people talking about this side of things. Couldn't agree more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Given that countries/cities can go into this state for a very long time without resolution, I am not quite optimistic.
Yeah, this pattern happens all the time:
1. Plant new trees,
2. Eat fruit from trees, get used to delicious fruit,
3. Planting trees hard, easier to wring out more juice from existing fruit,
4. Forget how to maintain trees, trees die, go to 1.
We are entering stage 3.