HACKER Q&A
📣 anonnon

Have LLMs sapped your motivation for open source?


Not just the sense that an implicit social contract was broken by LLMs disregarding licenses, or the hassles of dealing with AI (especially agentic) contributions, but the fact that the reputational benefit for large contributions--especially large, largely one-person projects--isn't really there any more, since most people now, upon looking at it, instead of being impressed with what you've accomplished, will just ask:

> How much of this was AI-generated?

Especially if it resembles existing projects somewhat or involves some form of translation. And should you insist it wasn't AI, I can easily see people finding that less charmingly quaint and more foolish:

> Why would you bother doing this entirely by hand instead of heavily using agents and prompting? Do you still do long division as well?

It's evident that even most programmers don't really care how software was constructed and what the code looks like (assuming they don't have to deal with it), only how well it functions.


  👤 gus_massa Accepted Answer ✓
I like MT/BSD, so I don't care if someone stick two fake wiggle eyes to a potato and make it program. (There is the attribution problem, but let's ignore it.)

But I expect people that like GPL and AGPL to be really really really annoyed.

>> How much of this was AI-generated?

That part is getting boring. If someone start the sentences with a capital letter and end them with a period, some idiot will claim it was written by AI.