Mastodawn

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

@asie i'd add that the cheapest plan is $20 which is surprisingly compelling to me and i too am only held back by the same argument you're making about gaining an uncontrollable dependency

Travis F W Mar 8

@michcia aipol yeah. I can barely call myself a developer between life issues and parenting, and since claude writes bash, and I'm not forgetting bash, $20 is indeed worth it. Honestly helping me keep my skills up not the reverse, but maybe that's another way I'm weird.

But also yeah excellent social commentary @asie.

Were there ideas on solving the lonely dev problem?

V Carnage, 六七 Mar 7

@asie well said! /gen

Wolf480pl Mar 7

@asie
paying the maintainers would probably help a bit, but do you think it would solve the problem? IME the thing that's helps with burnout more is another person you can rely on to take care of things when you take a break, or don't want to do a particular task.

@wolf480pl i don't think money alone can solve it, but i don't think the lack of money helps.

Citing a famous Polish comedy flick, "pieniądze to nie wszystko, ale wszystko bez pieniędzy to..."

Jezus Michał "Le Wzdych" (on)Mar 7

@wolf480pl @asie, honestly, I don't think money alone will help. Essentially, we've fucked civilization up.

The problem is not "not getting paid". The problem is getting a less or more bullshit job to pay your bills. The problem is corporate assholes turning your life to shit. The problem is other people, in the end.

People have happily worked on all these packages for free, for a long time. Burnout doesn't come from that. It comes from having a shitty job, it comes from having a shitty life, and it comes from the IT sector being overrun by shitty LinkedIn-brained people who enshittify everything they touch, including other people. The problem is really that wherever you look, whatever you do, you end up covered in so much shit, that you regret ever turning a computer on.

Wolf480pl Mar 7

@mgorny @asie
At my previous job, I was maintaining infrastructure for something I believed in. Most of the tech used was fairly reasonable.

I still felt (partial?) burnout when I ended up being the only one on the team.

IMO, if you have too much responsibility and nobody to help you out, you can burn out doing your dream job on a dream tech stack.

Stephen Brooks 🦆Mar 7

@mgorny @wolf480pl @asie ^ This. You can do amazing things with computers but commercial incentives are almost diametrically opposed to that.

Hannah (With a snake problem 🐍)Mar 7

@asie These thoughts were floating around in this head as well.... but Hannah lacked the ability to express what you very elegantly put into words.

The underlying issues were never addressed... and the symptoms are now showing up everywhere.

Thanks for putting this into words~

neobot_cat_ears_heart_cybre

@asie I think, fundamentally, that a tool mimicking a cheap, very fast and very enthusiastic intern is a no-brainer, and the only considerations are the cost and any moral issues. Cost isn't high and moral issues are mostly made up by people mad that their jobs are being automated, so increasing adoption is only the matter of time and people realising they're fighting windmills.

Ted Mielczarek Mar 7

@Amikke @asie "no-brainer" certainly applies here, but not in the way you're using it.

@Amikke In the late 1980s, Sun Microsystems tried to unbundle the C compiler from SunOS, leading to a bunch of sysadmins picking up a niche, academic project called the GNU C Compiler.

Over time, this led to a golden age where anyone could have access to industry-leading tools, pretty much everything required to effectively create code, for free - anything from compilers through IDEs to version control. Of course, cloud solutions existed for various things, but they were never really compulsory. Likewise, while faster machines certainly helped, an used $100~$150 laptop let you accomplish most things at an acceptable rate for a decade+ now.

The infeasibility of self-hosting "frontier" large language models without thick pockets is, in my opinion, the undoing of this golden age and a threat to a kind of "digital sovereignty" afforded to the field of programming. Likewise, the rate of expansion of the LLM hosting industry is threatening the accessible pricing of computer hardware.

This sets aside other issues, which I do indeed share. I have privately been a long-running skeptic of piracy's impact on at least some aspects of culture even before LLM training came to rely on it. As a project maintainer, I need to be responsible and consider that European law does not necessarily have to evolve in its favor. I'm also still not exactly satisfied with the output of these tools; but maybe my comparatively lower wages as a Pole affect the perception of "cheapness" of the LLM solution somewhat.

This doesn't exhaust my feelings on the matter, but I hope I have made it clear that my position does not stem from "made up moral issues"; of course, you are free to disagree with me.

@asie outside-hosting "frontier" LLMs is also infeasible for many cases. The market will settle on a decent proportion of price to performance, including the price of hardware, once the bubble pops.

Open source has always survived or thrived despite lower manpower due to good co-operation practices and passion. Increasing effective productivity on both sides of the equation does little to mitigate that.

The tools exist, and they are useful. Boycotting them is infeasible, it's like being mad at Photoshop in 2005 for being too efficient yet expensive and continuing to edit photos in Paint. Pushing open source projects to reject them only harms them by tipping the productivity scale even more not in their favour. And as for piracy and EU's law, EU has tried to tighten down copyright laws so much that just learning on many examples would give their authors partial copyright over your work before. It was not a good idea and was rightfully killed, with Poles leading the opposition, at that.

Dźwiedziu Mar 8

@Amikke
> moral issues are mostly made up by people mad that their jobs are being automated

Please tell me which of the following issues are made up or aren't to be viewed on the basis of morality:
- outsourcing amotional labour and worker abuse to the Global South,
https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-content-moderators-unionized-africa
- “AI” abusing resources being a basic human right, https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2026/01/11/americas-ai-boom-is-running-into-an-unplanned-water-problem/,
- the Nazi Bar turned a paid CSAM generator, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/x-blames-users-for-grok-generated-csam-no-fixes-announced/

(Not a complete list.)

OpenAI’s Content Moderators Just Unionized in Africa

Over 150 African content moderators — whose work has helped to power AI systems at Facebook, TikTok, and OpenAI — have unionized.

Futurism

GNUkko Sauvage (eris-ng)

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

GNUkko Sauvage (eris-ng)

Ahhh I see, thanks !

@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.

twosky2000 Mar 7

@asie [me: hobby script kiddy]
For me AI is a tool, more about learning and menial tasks. It is not a golden bullet(answer for everything).
It is sad that we still do not have dignified income or a plan for it. That would make the whole AI problem go away or would at least make it technical.
[Optimistic View]
I can also imagine that it could help with coordination of work, especially for single user or small groups.

twosky2000 Mar 7

It feels of the scale from horses to cars. Image each car would be a horse.. The scale would likely not be solvable. But it will bring new easy solvable problems that will be a base for the future(like highways). That's what I'm excited about, not the outsourcing jobs.

@asie uhh were the (*) and the (**) supposed to mean smth/go to some footnote?

Theo 🏳️‍⚧️

@asie Wait, they're vibe coding vim??? MOTHERFUCKING VIM???

@tehrealgh5tbusters @asie it's joever. use plan 9 sam 5ever

@asie indeed, thank you for putting this into words.
looking at the current vim maintainers, they have resorted to LLM tools exactly because of this. to give a concrete example, Christian Brabant is about to be burned out and doesn't have any free time (source). the same is true of other maintainers.

there is a serious problem with how open-source development is funded and how maintainers are treated. FOSS developers must be properly supported for their work, and not just by benevolent tech companies that allow developers to work on FOSS projects on company time or with ephemeral grants (NLnet, GSoC, …).

maybe there should be some sort of regulations around the supply chain and software used by corporations to require them to properly support FOSS developers of libraries they use. but how could this work in practice, as short of dual-licensing, there are no provisions in most FOSS licenses that require payment for corporations?

Add setrepeat() and getrepeat() functions for dot command control by Shougo · Pull Request #19413 · vim/vim

Summary Add setrepeat() and getrepeat() functions to allow scripts to programmatically control the dot (.) repeat command. This enables plugins to: Save and restore the repeat command Make custom ...

GitHub

Dźwiedziu Mar 8

@asie
“Illuminant” and “accelerant” so a fire accelerant?

@dzwiedziu that's one way to look at it for sure

Luna 🦊🇩🇰🏳️‍⚧️Mar 10

@asie as part of Inochi2D I *am* working on a library to eventually be an alternative to harfbuzz. Contributions are welcome as long as they aren't vibe coded.

https://github.com/Inochi2D/hairetsu