Comment by lukan
9 hours ago
"Vibe coding raises productivity by lowering the cost of using and building on existing code, but it also weakens the user engagement through which many maintainers earn returns."
I think the title is clickbait.
The conclusion is:
"Vibe coding represents a fundamental shift in how software is produced and consumed. The productivity gains are real and large. But so is the threat to the open source ecosystem that underpins modern software infrastructure. The model shows that these gains and threats are not independent: the same technology that lowers costs also erodes the engagement that sustains voluntary contribution."
The dangers I see rather in projects drowning in LLM slop PR's, instead of less engagement.
And the benefits of LLMs to open source in lowering the cost to revive and maintain (abandoned) projects.
Two of the authors are engaging on bluesky regarding the "clickbaityness" of the paper:
https://bsky.app/profile/gaborbekes.bsky.social/post/3md4rga...
(Note, I receive a thanks in the paper.)
author here. indeed, a more preceise title could be
> given everything we know about OSS incentives from prior studies and how easy it is to load an OSS library with your AI agent, the demand-reducing effect of vibe coding is larger than the productivity-increasing effect
but that would be a mouthful
How about "Vibe coding might hurt open source"?
do you have experience in reviving an abandoned project? which way did you go? what would be a sensible approach?
I am currently in the process of finding out.
LLM's did help with quickly researching dependencies unknown to me and investigating build errors, but ideally I want to set it up in a way, that the agent can work on its own, change -> try to build -> test it. Once that works half automated, I call it success.
> The productivity gains are real and large
This is also just untrue. There is a study showing that the productivity gain is -20%, developers (and especially managers) just assume it is +25%. And when they are told about this they still feel they are +20% faster. It's the dev equivalent of mounting a cool-looking spoiler to your car.
There are productivity gains, but they're in the fuzzy tasks like generating documentation and breaking up a project into bite-sized tasks. Or finding the right regex or combination of command line flags, and that last one I would triple verify if it was anything difficult to reverse.
What even is "engagement" here? Seems like abstract harm that rationalizes whatever emotion the reader already feels.