New blog post: "The fate of 'small' open source" https://nolanlawson.com/2025/11/16/the-fate-of-small-open-source/

Some meandering thoughts on writing open source when LLMs can do a lot of the same thing. I don't have all the answers, but I'm trying to ask the right questions anyway.

The fate of “small” open source

By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads. It’s a small collection of utilities for working w…

Read the Tea Leaves

@nolan Interesting thoughts.

So far I was mostly annoyed with realising too late after started reading it that the doc was written using LLMs. The feeling that no care has been put to it is offensive when I've become used to great documentation such as the one you've created.

The point of the documentation wasn't to be just a reference.

Maybe we are losing something that is not important. Maybe not.

@augustohp @nolan I’ve tried to come up with some sort of clever name for the “anti-documentation” that gets written for LLMs and then LLMs are capable of spitting so much of it back.

Good documentation is “here’s what the thing does” and much more importantly *how* and *why* it does it. The best documentation also includes “what we learned along the way”. The anti-documentation is “here’s what we want the thing to do” but often no clear indication of *how* or *why* and no learnings.

@max nailed it.