HACKER Q&A
📣 japhyr

How will AI tools affect your participation in open source?


I've had some brief conversations about this, and I'm curious if anyone here has thoughts. With all of these code-adjacent tools coming out, it's not hard to imagine a number of AI tools starting to open issues and PRs on open source projects.

If you're an OS maintainer or contributor, does this affect your willingness to keep contributing? Do you feel differently about responding to an issue opened by an AI tool? What if it's not clear which issues are coming from AI tools and which are from people?

I have contributed to open source for years, because I like to help people and I've certainly benefited from the contributions of others. But I have to admit, a good part of the appeal has been the interactions with other people throughout the process. I think my attitude towards open source work is going to be different if there's an AI abstraction layer between my work and other humans.


  👤 night-rider Accepted Answer ✓
> I think my attitude towards open source work is going to be different if there's an AI abstraction layer between my work and other humans.

I noticed roughly a 3x gain in productivity, but nothing like the kind of 10x output people are scared of, and fearful of being out of a job. In the end, these things are just tools. We will always need a human in the loop to check the code and ensure it does what was intended.