Carina C. ZonaI specialize in developer relations for OSS dev tooling. It physically pains me to think of what actual dev productivity advancement this industry could achieve overnight if VCs had put those billions upon billions instead into the R&D, development, maintenance, documentation, UX, and security of actual OSS dev tooling. LLMs are crude sticks and mud compared to what is already on your system today. So many powerful and reliable tools go under-used because they don't have the promotional support, have documentation that has not been honed by technical writers, and UX that tbqh needs better ergonomics. But the bones are strong. So strong. My god, what amazing things you'd be doing with them right now -- safely -- if they just got enough love to put that last bit of needed polish on. The "AI" hype/fraud is harming the industry by redirecting massive resources away from features we actually need for making software better and doing it faster. It's harming the industry by polluting search engines with so much false and misleading generated content that finding correct answers is getting legit difficult. It's harming the industry by cutting off our supply of junior engineers, and by cutting off senior engineers from learning how to mentor new talent. So much money and labor being wasted on a pipedream when the low hanging fruit was, and remains, _right there_
Send some money to your favourite OSS dev tooling project, folks. Setup a subscription so they can rely on it coming. Even 5 bucks a month is gonna do good. If nothing else, it's a morale boost for some dev who has been labouring on the project for years without ever seeing the kind of life-changing investment that "AI" bullshitters get handed routinely.
Raghav Agrawal
Molly White