vim, harfbuzz, who's next? people ask in shock, but...

i think, fundamentally, the reason Claude and Codex are becoming part of crucial FOSS projects is the same reason xz almost became the entry point for mass-scale server hacking a few years ago. we've decided to make billion dollar industries rely on burned out, lonely individual developers who never found a way to get paid for their labor. we never managed to solve that problem.

these burned out, lonely devs see a tool that spits out the boring part of their work in a more or less functional manner if you squint, and it "only" (*) costs "$200" (**) a month. i can imagine why most people take it. heck, i won't deny that i am tempted myself, but my convictions remain too strong.

i've also seen some say that these people should step down and make way for new developers. who, exactly? i know how many months it took me to find a maintainer for one of the more popular Minecraft mods, and that's a position with both far more takers and far less responsibility on either side.

i think that a lot of what's going to happen to software in the next few years is the consequence of long term systemic issues. the introduction of LLM tools to the equation is merely an illuminant and accelerant
it "only" () costs "$200" () a month.
Also wouldn't be surprised if LLM companies are giving those tool maintainers generous free trials as well. Similar to how every third modern Java or Kotlin project on GitHub has a JetBrains ad in the readme.
@[email protected] Claude does, but only for really popular projects. Codex does as well, now.

https://claude.com/contact-sales/claude-for-oss
https://developers.openai.com/codex/community/codex-for-oss/

However, these programs only appeared
after many of those projects adopted LLM technology.
Claude for Open Source | Claude by Anthropic

Apply to the Claude for Open Source program. Eligible OSS maintainers and contributors get Claude Max for 6 months on us.

Claude
@asie @eris as with probably any SaaS, free tiers, trials and cheap plans are more or less generous when they launch. And there's lots of indirect offering for access to these models.
@lnl @[email protected] I have seen very few projects actually opt for Copilot instead of Claude/Codex, which until recently did not have a free access program.

I can only think of two I have interacted with, and both do not really do "agentic programming" or direct inclusion of LLM code - rather, they use Copilot as a code review tool, picking up issues and proposing simple bugfixes, at most for writing testing boilerplate.