Comment by simondotau

Whatever the decision is today, it's going to become utterly moot within a decade or so.

Think about how far we've come over the past three years. Programming with AI in ten years will be utterly unfathomable. It would be like showing Fable 5 to someone a decade ago. It will be unbelievable.

In twenty years, programming by hand might be somewhat akin to writing assembly today: a skill that a limited number of programmers understand, and fewer still actively practise. Writing code by hand will become the new "I want to be close to the metal."

Perhaps by 2050, the concept of a Linux "distro" will be obsolete, replaced by a GPL-licensed local AI that just directly assembles everything from scratch to meet your exact specifications. Instead of relying on a predefined package manager, it traverses a distributed network of trust to find suitable candidate parts, downloading and verifying every line of source code before compiling it all locally. Trust would be rooted in the local AI's ability to understand and evaluate it, meaning that what replaces the distro are the groups competing for the best models.

Perhaps by 2070, nobody even writes or distributes code any more. The future kernel and web browser aren't code, they're descriptions of verifiable intent. A software project is really an extremely detailed description of what the software is meant to do. Your local GPL-licensed AI would decide how to write, assemble, patch, optimise, and integrate it for your hardware and your threat model. That would also blur the distinction between kernels, operating systems, and applications. The AI doesn't construct a computing environment as we know it today with discrete applications. It builds a coherent system that satisfies all requirements, rebuilding parts whenever your priorities change.

Downloading compiled code? Implicitly trusting someone else's source code? These will become the things people only do on hardware that is sufficiently air-gapped from any outside influence.