Andrii Bidochko

• Updated: February 3, 2026
• 41 min read

Vibe Coding Threatens Open‑Source Collaboration, Says Hackaday

Skip to content Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new OSS project significantly harder.“Vibe coding” here is defined as software development that is assisted by an LLM-backed chatbot, where the developer asks the chatbot to effectively write the code for them. Arguably this turns the developer into more of a customer/client of the chatbot, with no requirement for the former to understand what the latter’s code does, just that what is generated does the thing that the chatbot was asked to create.This also removes the typical more organic selection process of libraries and tooling, replacing it with whatever was most prevalent in the LLM’s training data. Even for popular projects visits to their website decrease as downloads and documentation are replaced by LLM chatbot interactions, reducing the possibility of promoting commercial plans, sponsorships, and community forums. Much of this is also reflected in the plummet in usage of community forums like Stack Overflow.(Credit: Koren et al., 2026) If we consider this effect of ‘AI-assisted’ software development to be effectively the delegating of the actual engineering and development to the statistical model of an LLM, then it’s easy to see the problems here. The LLM will not interact with the developers of a library or tool, nor submit usable bug reports, or be aware of any potential issues no matter how well-documented.Although the authors of this paper are still proponents of ‘AI technology’, their worries seem well-warranted, even if it’s unclear at this point how big the impact is going to be. Software ecosystems like those involving JavaScript, Python, and web technologies are likely to suffer the impact from vibe coding first, as their audiences appear to be more into such vibes, and the training sets were largest.It’s also a topic that is highly controversial, ever since Microsoft launched GitHub Copilot in 2021. Since then we saw reports in 2024 that ‘vibe coding’ using Copilot and similar chatbots offered no real benefits unless adding 41% more bugs is a measure of success.By the time we hit 2025, we can observe an even more negative mood, with LLM chatbots in general being accused of degrading the cognitive skills of those using them, vibe coding chatbots reducing productivity by 19%, and experienced developers who gave them a whirl subsequently burning them to the ground in scathing reviews. All of which reinforces the notion that perhaps this ‘AI revolution’ is more of a stress test for human intelligence than an actual boost to productivity or code quality.Despite the authors pitching the idea that OpenAI or Google could toss a few cents the way of OSS projects when their code is being used, the comparison with Spotify is painfully apt, since about 80% of artists on Spotify rarely have their tracks played and thus receive basically no money for their efforts.With an LLM statistical model we know with extremely high likelihood that only the dependencies that are most prevalent in the training data set will realistically be used for the output, and we expect that we’ll see something similar happen with this vibe coding compensation scheme. Even today we can already observe many negative effects from ‘AI slop’ in software development.Whether it’ll be something that’ll choke the life out of the entire OSS ecosystem remains to be seen, but it is hard to envision a bright vibe coding future. Post navigation ← Running DOOM And Super Mario 64 Inside A PDF FileTeardown Of An Apple AirTag 2 With Die Shots → 64 thoughts on “How Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source” I have been programming since i was 13. QBASIC, VB6, C, python, java, javascript, shell/batch script i learned them all.Then i gradually got into embedded systems, programming microcontrollers and eventually designing hardware itself. After i got employed, i starting programming less and less. All my life i thought I enjoyed programming, but ever since LLMs released and got good enough to write code for me i have realised that i didn’t really enjoy coding much, it was always what the code could do for me, that was enjoyable.Making code draw pixels on the screen or making it output an exact pwm to drive a FET in a switching converter. That’s what is enjoyable. Not the syntax or worrying about the bitmask or anything else. This is also why i never really enjoyed high level software too much. A lot of it was always about babysitting the framework/library instead of actually doing things. So much boilerplate, so many “let’s make this into a module in case we need to swap the implementation).I could never tolerate working in overly object oriented (enterprise “quality” code, if you will) codebases. Still i will not lie, a part of me hates LLMs for taking away programming from me. It was a peaceful and soliditary activity that i could enjoy on the weekends. Something that reminded me “the process matters too, not just the product in the end” and use my brain. Now I get a sad feeling when I’m writing code telling me “you could just make the LLM do this, do you enjoy wasting time?”.You can’t enjoy when you’re mind is telling you that. PS: ask LLMs to write any kind of close to the metal code with a lot of interrupts…. Yeah it’ll fail spectacularly. Kinda fun to see Report comment Reply I started coding on a TRS-80 and later a Commodore 64. When I got my first “real job” I did a lot of coding in C and really enjoyed it. But somewhere in the late 90’s and early 2000’s my job transitioned to mostly just gluing together other people’s code and libraries.Then it was mostly using Google to find specific solutions to using some API or another. LLMs for me have just replaced Google to get specific answers without having to search through a lot of Stackoverflow posts. I’d like to get back into doing more of a “full stack” type of development, even if it was for personal projects. But I really don’t have time for it. And I’m lazy.So I think I’m going to try writing up detailed specs for what I want and turn Claude Code loose on it to see what happens. Report comment Reply I have asked agent implement a game which I sketched 12 years ago. Emits the most boring part and save a lot of time for me. Report comment Reply Now I get a sad feeling when I’m writing code telling me “you could just make the LLM do this, do you enjoy wasting time?”. You can’t enjoy when you’re mind is telling you that.Just remember that efficiency itself is evil, and the most efficient world is probably hell. Wasting time is therefore a moral good. Never optimize yourself unless you intend to lose your humanity. Report comment Reply Efficiency isn’t evil, it’s just fragile. Chasing efficiency rarely works or lasts, because it results in unintended consequences and systems that break down as soon as you let them run free as they would. Efficient systems tend to be high maintenance, which defeats their point.Report comment Reply I think he meant “trying to be an efficient HUMAN being”, while you’re talking about efficient machine. Trying to be an efficient human is like try to be a machine, that’s why he said unless you intend to lose your humanity Report comment Reply Trying to be an efficient human begs the question about what humans are supposed to do. I find myself most efficient at doing exactly nothing of importance.Report comment An efficient system will break if any detail of it departs from the script. Every part must be 100% perfect, even though its builder almost certainly wasn’t. What could possibly go wrong? Give me a sloppy, inefficient system any day. Report comment Reply We are barely in the version 1.5 of LLMs that are coding. So what if the next Gen LLMs learn to code that bit that they are failing today as well.We always made a machine do things the way we wanted and here comes the machines that can do the same with our intentions. Pretty cool evolution worth for 21st century indeed. Now it’s time to move on to solving real problems. Report comment Reply “Much of this is also reflected in the plummet in usage of community forums like Stack Overflow.” Hmmm…do I want to post a question to stack overflow and be publicly ridiculed or critiqued? Or do I want to ask an LLM instead?Stack Overflow did it to itself. Report comment Reply Replying because of how much I related to what you wrote. It describes my programming depression from last months x)I keep trying to implement at least some. Things by myself for fun, to make sure I don’t lose he skill, to feed my ego (?), but my brain just can’t handle it because another thread is thinking about how useless I’m using my time.On the other hand, I’m now able to put all the ideas I had throughout the years that I didn’t because I lacked motivation. Specially in learning programming it self. Even though I idealize liking programming. I’m not sure if I like it or not honestly. But I definitely enjoy the results and the theory behind programming. The thing is there are always so much ways to design the architecture at every level that it overwhelms me and I don’t try. I guess I lack programming theory.Report comment Reply It’s not like you just ask the AI for the program, it spits it out and you go off and use it. I’m finding that for the simple, mundane, repetitive stuff. “ex, go through all these many options in a switch statement and do something following the same pattern for each.” it takes away a lot of the stuff that really puts me to sleep. I have recently started using AI for more complex tasks where I would have to do significant research.Maybe it’s just the way I phrase my questions but for that sort of thing I find the result is usually more instructive, teaching me what I needed to know than it is a black box that I would use without understanding. Also… it usually takes significant troubleshooting, several tries to get things working and I am going through the troubleshooting with it, interjecting my own thoughts and knowledge. Library bugs certainly do still crop up during that process and I can still submit a bug report.I do see where AI could result in one being steered towards libraries that are more prominent in the AI’s training data. But isn’t it just skimming that data off the internet anyway? Doing it myself I would end up favoring whatever libraries show up most prominent in Google. I’m guessing the training data is probably built the same way. Report comment Reply I find that it’s the simple repetitive stuff that the AI cannot really be trusted for, because it tends to slip in random variations.The more you ask of it, the more likely it will introduce an error that requires you to go through the whole thing, line by line, to make sure that it does what you asked for. The very worst thing you can do with an LLM is to say “Take this code and clean it up, but don’t change any functionality or logic.”; it will absolutely do the opposite. Report comment Reply In my experience, if I tell the LLM not to make any changes besides X, it will follow my instructions perfectly.This is sometimes dependent on the length of the chat and the context window, and when it last saw the iteration of the code I want modified. Anytime you want something very specific done to some code, you should provide a fresh reference by pasting the code. This way it stays in the context window and doesn’t get summarized or hand-waved away. Gemini under some situations is supposed to have a 1 million token context window.I haven’t tried it yet, but if it works as advertised, that would do away with all the copying and pasting of the same code over and over. Report comment Reply Oh yah. I could never just let it generate pages of code and then trust that to just work. Sadly, we are a MickySoft shop here, coding in Visual Studio. No, not a MickySoft fan but I am warming up to Copilot. Mine is currently set to use GPT-5.Anyway, I’ll start something which is going to be a long monotonous pattern and it suggests the completion of the pattern. Often it gets it right. Sometimes it doesn’t but is close enough that it is less annoying of a task to fix the errors than to type it out manually. I still do have to read it to be sure. Report comment Reply I’ve wanted to write a puzzle solving program for several decades now. (E.g. fitting tetris shapes into a specific shape). Recently i managed to finally get it working.I wrote the move piece left and up routines and then ai did the boring typing of move right and down. It now solves one specific puzzle, but i’ll generalize it when i get around to it again…(in a decade or so by the looks of it.) Report comment Reply It is also good for promoting you to fill in the blanks in your design. Then both you and the agent knows what is going to be built. Report comment Reply I don’t know… AI helped me make my FIRST open source project.I know several current and forgotten languages (been a programmer for over 30 years, that’s my career), but the depth required to do the full-blown app have never been worth it to me, and what I specialize in would not serve the purpose. Now, I was able to make a soup-to-nuts app, with testing, etc. I know what an app should be like, I know how it should work, I know how to design. Now I’m the boss, the client…. the AI does my bidding.And honestly, it helps me solve bug reports in my “real job” programming WAY faster than I can. I give it a hint like “might be in this handler or this js file, here’s a screen shot, you can login with Chrome MCP and see for yourself, just do a, b and c”. I’ve solved about 30 bugs this way so far that have gotten reported to me. Report comment Reply I think the data is flawed.I use AI while coding to filter through the information available and cut out reading dozens and dozens of requests on Stack Overflow and other sites for appropriate resolutions. So the usage might be down, but how much of that is using AI chatbots to screen through the throngs of data to get you a useful answer. I know it helps me with that kind of thing, but if I have it write any code for me it’s code that I adapt after the fact and I do not allow it to use just anything.We are the users, we are responsible for the products we deploy. If developers start using AI exclusively we run the risk of systems that fail and a populace that only knows how to ask the funny little white box in the corner why it happened, instead of using the art of debugging. Tread carefully, lest we lose basic knowledge that got us here in the first place. Report comment Reply I’ve been assuming that vibe coding is just one more abstraction layer.And abstraction layers have been upsetting me since they neutered the machine language skills that I worked so hard to learn. And assembly language, and, and, and. I’ve stopped fighting it, I’m not proud of that, but I think it would be easier to fight the government than to fight an abstraction layer. And given the rate of change, vibe coding may be abstracted away any minute now. Open Source is dead, long live Open Source!Report comment Reply I believe that we shouldn’t talk only about vibe coding; we need a smart coding approach. I wrote more about this in the article. https://dev.to/kolkov/smart-coding-vs-vibe-coding-engineering-discipline-in-the-age-of-ai-5b20 Report comment Reply I flunked out of coding from data structures twice and did other things in life. LLM’s have been great for me doing hobby server stuffs.Report comment Reply We need to learn how to efficiently and sustainable use these powerful wonderful tools. So, now I’m going to ask my cloudy llama/grok/geppetto “How to efficiently and sustainable use yor possibilities?” Report comment Reply I don’t think the question is whether or not llms are useful or can help people. It’s about does it endanger oss and some people have gone further to share concerns about the internets utility more broadly. I think it’s clear it endangers oss.It’s harder for adoption, a class of users are no longer finding bugs, the bugs being found are often complete noise, and an LLM might prefer to copy an oss project with slight modification rather then import it. I could go on, but basic second order thinking makes it clear that the signal to noise problem is now more of an issue than before. Report comment Reply feeling like a minority. i like programming. it’s fun to do something well.everything i write, my goal is to remove redundancy, remove bloat, remove extraneous dependencies, and to find a clean factoring that makes all problems simple. the last thing i want is a bigger or more capable black box. i do sometimes want automated tools for mechanical tasks (provably correct transforms), and LLMs these days are heading in the opposite direction but i imagine they’ll come around.i play against a chess engine that, if i understand correctly, uses a neural network to prioritize a classical (provably correct) search. a lot of low-hanging fruit in that kind of system, i imagine. Report comment Reply To me vibe coding is instructing an LLM by a non-coder and let the LLM write the code. But I don’t see this endangering OSS at all.Existing projects have developers, and developers armed with an LLM are much more productive and write much better code than a non developer ever could squeeze out of an LLM. I think this is going to be the end for commercial software sooner than OSS, OSS will grow much faster now than before and reach maturity and even surpassing commercial software at some point in functionality, stability etc. and don’t contain as much commercial slop and bloat.Sure, there’ll be more slop, but that’s a given when new technologies arise. Between the slop will always be some gems. Report comment Reply The unique problem for open source is the extent it makes development a democratic process. There are clearly more idiots (w or wout LLMs) then competent programmers. Even in the comments section of HackaDay! If the idiots can all vote themselves commit privileges, the project is done.I don’t think that’s a viable threat, for most sensibly arranged projects. Idiots have already tried voting/harassing Linus out of the Kernel. Apparently, he’s rude to them. Nothing new. It will put extra load on OSS project ‘gatekeepers’, but simply banning anybody incompetent enough to just submit LLM slop should do the trick. One strike, out. Perhaps a LLM to detect LLM slop and direct cut/paste from same places LLM didn’t actually learn anything. Will need a human for ‘sanity check’.It’s hard to say if it would actually help. Or just huge generate noise that looks just enough like signal to really F things up. On the gripping hand, there are a large # of code changes that are just API calls. Those will invariably look a lot like available examples. But you can’t just let that category in automatically. It’s got to be the right API. LLMs are particularly bad at not mixing a two APIs together in one result. Exactly what you’d expect from a statistical word salad generator.Last I saw was enums from API #1 being used in LLM slop for API #2. Both APIs doing similar things. Report comment Reply “Killing Open Source” is clearly hyperbole, but a reason I don’t often see articulated is that “Open Source” is actually the natural and normal way to code. I see a lot of my generation started with dialects of Basic, which many computer companies seemed glad to include for free, at a time when “using a computer” was synonymous with coding.To them it didn’t matter there were hundred of variations, users could put their cute little programs together and trade and perhaps even sell them, like trading cards. Perhaps it’s a coincidence Microsoft sold many of these Basics, but it’s in line with their overall “programmers over users”. But, of course, 8-bit computers really needed a faster language, and both amateurs and “shareware” programmers needed faster languages like C, and other languages that were more platform agnostic.But that meant a loss of control, from the manufacturers(who were also software providers), and why IBM bumbled on it’s own invention of the PC. The customers would keep making their own software, and selling it. Those dedicated to their “Free Software” found they needed to protect their work legally, to do what the big tech of the time thought they could control in a little walled garden with their own MS Basics.The very idea of BASIC was to provide an open programming environment for learning and sharing, and though it evolved into FOSS, it was always going to be a significant part of computing. So, maybe programming will devolve into sharing prompts rather than true programming languages as we know them now. But there will always be those that create and share their work, and tweak existing code to run faster and better. The genie is out of the bottle. This is just my reaction to the title.Whatever follows in the article may be fine, but it’s not about Open Source dying, by any means. Report comment Reply To them it didn’t matter there were hundred of variations It mattered quite a lot, because the point was to capture users to their variant. The fragmentation was intentional, though ultimately counter-productive.The point of BASIC being a universal programming language for beginners was just a poorly held facade – each company wanted their users to use their version on their hardware, so they introduced subtle differences and incompatibilities that made direct porting of software between systems as difficult as they could get away with. Report comment Reply I researched ANSI BASIC recently. The committee was IIRC Kemeny and Kurtz (Dartmouth) and Texas Instruments.It deliberated from 1978-1983 releasing two versions. Little did I know that my first dialect was ANSI TI BASIC on the TI-99/4A. Except for the committee members, almost nobody produced an ANSI BASIC. It’s interesting to me that TI stuck to ANSI syntax in a myriad of business products , including calculators. There was an internal document with coherent subsets to apply in each context.Report comment Reply Let’s also not just act like every single new coder is going to be vibe coding and never even once be curious about how it all works themselves. I learned TI-BASIC and immediately jumped into z80 asm because I wanted to know how the calculator worked underneath. Now I know asm flavors, BASIC flavors, C flavors, etc. It’s lowering the bar to entry, and to those that let it, that’s as far as they’ll go. How is that different from the dev copy-pasting from Google?That certainly didn’t ruin coding or OSS. Real coders exist, and always will. Report comment Reply Copy paste from Google? Luxury. When I was a kid, we typed programs (games mostly) from paper magazines and we liked it! Report comment Reply And we didn’t understand any of it, because the magazine was in a foreign language. Once, a boy figured out that it was actually in English and found a dictionary, well, the child protective services had to be called… Report comment Reply You had magazines?Wow. I had to type programs from mimeographed newsletters where sometimes the purple ink was weak. Worse if two pages stuck together! Just kidding, I had magazines and David H Ahl’s MORE BASIC COMPUTER GAMES. Report comment Reply AI is killing everything, including the planet. Report comment Reply Don’t worry, the planet will return the favor. Report comment Reply You’re killing me!🤣🤣🤣 Report comment Reply On the topic of Stackoverflow as a symptom of LLM use: I got a lot out of SO, while simultaneously irked by 1) the tendency to not answer the question asked, and 2) getting the impression that it was turning into off-shoring s/w engineering support. Unless Tata, Wipro and the like are diving head first into vibe coding their clients’ projects, it appears I was wrong about #2. Report comment Reply For Tata?If they started using complete idiots just vibe coding you’d immediately know. Their results would improve drastically. Report comment Reply If the LLMs are using open source code for training and people stop producing new os code… How will novel stuff happen? It feels like there’s an issue here around LLMs learning from themselves?Also I’ve not looked into licensing: I’ve recently had my first use of an llm (Gemini) doing something useful: I wanted a plugin for kicad that did rectangular shaped spiral traces and within a minute it had made me the plugin, with the right options in the plugin’s menu and instructions on how to install it. Should/can I upload to GitHub? Is there any point? The next person who needs this facility can just ask Gemini.But … This only was possible because of the hundreds of plugins already on GitHub that it learnt from…. How will it learn to do plugins for new libraries and software? Report comment Reply If you format it according to all open source standards and support it, then why not… That’s what I did.I had a lot of shared code in my private projects, so I extracted it, formatted it, and it became a great ecosystem of fairly professional projects that I use for my private projects, but others can now use them too. And yes, I do track issues; that turned out to be the hardest part—keeping everything perfect. But smart coding made it possible.I wouldn’t have had time to do it all by hand, separate it into separate libraries, format it according to all the standards, write documentation, and track all the changes. But I manage the agents, not them manage me. https://dev.to/kolkov/smart-coding-vs-vibe-coding-engineering-discipline-in-the-age-of-ai-5b20 https://github.com/kolkov Report comment Reply That. I’ve been a top 1% SO for quite a few years.Then LLM’s started to use it for training / as an income model, students for homework and lazy people as a Google surrogate. Its only voluntary, so I just stopped. In general I would argue this is a great way to kill a community. Report comment Reply There’s a concept: Dead Internet Theory, in which new OSS frameworks “do not exist unless they are in the training data.” In one case, React dominates all other frameworks, but it takes 18 months for LLM to “learn” the latest version!So LLM continues to spew workarounds, to use deprecated features, and to omit better ways to get the same result. Apart from nothing new getting discovered, it puts the burden on code reviewers to “update” the generated output. Report comment Reply Which raises the question whether the present situation is any worse.Previously, you might have found one helpful soul out of ten or twenty trying to second guess your intent or otherwise criticize your question, or just spouting nonsense as they didn’t know the answer any better than you. With the LLM you have a 90% chance of getting the right answer, or at least a 90% right answer which is better than amateur guesswork. If the complaint is that the AI will simply recycle the most elementary and trivial solutions, well, so do the people.Most of the people you get are perfectly mediocre and couldn’t point at anything clever – because they’ve learned all their tricks on the same forum. The real question is, does OSS die because AI breaks the “process”, or was there never really any process as imagined to begin with. Was it just the blind guiding the blind for the most part? Report comment Reply It should read “fixing open source projects in seconds flat” because that is what I use AI “vibe coding” for lol .I am on my 18th app probably that is a big hitter in the electronics game, but has had the same awful interface, necessity for web to remember commands/flags for that particular environment, or require 4 other python/rust/burgercode single function scripts to run along with their required sdks, apis and other bs. AI can easily fix most of these gripes in about 20 seconds and hand me a way more functional piece of software.I wish I could go back but it is just so much faster and easier than like others have said to pour hours into figuring out the correct flag to use with this particular distro blah blah I am getting angry just thinking about the abuse myself and others put themselves thru to see a random display show a hello world. AI as a hardware bench buddy is just awesome.Imagine having a non-gatekeeping, fragile ego graybeard on the bench beside you with every pinout known on every chip on the board and the protocols to trigger them if necessary. That is just awesome and incredibly helpful imho.Open source takes 20 people that forks into 6 projects and then everyone makes up and comes back for a final push on a project 8 years later and then promptly fizzle out with not even a toe over the finish line leaving things to sit until some other group comes along and does the same thing lol. I am pretty over it at this point.Report comment Reply I agree this impedance mismatch, where it used to be harder to write a fix than review it, and now it’s harder to review than to write, presents a lot of challenges for OSS. For instance I started using crush (https://github.com/charmbracelet/crush) a few weeks ago, and it’s awesome. I’ve also been extending it like crazy. But ultimately the only way to keep my contributions “available” while also using them myself was to implement a plugin system, caddy-style.This way the core team can see if I get any traction, if my code sucks, etc. but I don’t have to wait around for them. More and stricter quality gates will definitely help ofc, and I don’t have a problem having giving an LLM “hey, check out this PR and tell me if it’s good or not”. IDK if you could fully solve the problem, but at least reduce it a bit. Report comment Reply I don’t gt the stack overflow reference, making me doubt the research.The fact that stack overflow is becoming irrelevant is obvious (and scary, if not for forums like that, how can we get actual new knowledge into llms …). Anyway, for users stack overflow is stupid. Many post that are not just quite what they need, asking something takes forever in some cases (and in son cases literally forever). Chatbots are there at your win and do not tire. So chatbots are like companions and google at the same time.If a search engine where as good as llms, we would have seen the sane decline. So obvious IMO. Tl;Dr if I can ask an llm, why would I care to ask so? Report comment Reply I’m not a coder, I’m a mechanic. I like to build things, and not having a route to code production log-jams my creativity. Vibe-coding for my projects this last year has put the other half of many projects within reach and allowed me to dump cortical content. Is it perfect?Not at all, but the LLM can code, which I can’t, and I can think technically and do human things, which the LLM can’t. Claude Opus 4.5 has changed my life. Gemini 3 Pro, too, though it can’t really work that well with 1000 plus lines. You’re all coders and I’m sorry you’re put out, but I’m empowered (relative to my patience and tenacity), and I don’t really want to give it back.Report comment Reply It’s important to understand that without programming and engineering knowledge, an agent or LLM can lead you into the depths of programming. Yes, the code might build and compile, and sometimes even work, but it can’t be used in production; it’s fraught with… Report comment Reply “It’s important to understand that without programming and engineering knowledge, an agent or LLM can lead you into the depths of programming.” That’s good to know but it’s not clear what it means. Report comment Reply Probably because the community on StackOverflow is filled with serial redditors who are more interested in karma than answering questions. Constant belittling. Constant snark. Chatbots don’t do that. And they will get you the answer quicker. Report comment Reply I was recently handed a project based on Zephyr OS. This project was coded by humans.If I didn’t have an LLM to help me wade through the mountain of garbage I’m dealing with, I would still be sitting here trying to figure out which of the many configuration files I need to look at to figure out why the serial monitor refuses to work. Instead, I get a coding partner who, while flawed like any other coder, understands Zephyr FAR better than I do or did. This partner knows which file contains which part of the settings. API changes make things more difficult, but they always have.At least I have working serial output now. Consider FreeCAD. If you want to find information on FreeCAD, most of the results of a web search are going to be for some older version that no longer applies to what you want to do. You might glean a couple of tricks from the noise, but the problem is not that FreeCAD was updated, it’s that the web search engines don’t do a good job of pointing you to the right content based on your search. The situation is basically the same with programming.I want information on some version of Zephyr, but the search results I find are all across the spectrum of all the various releases. With an LLM I can get some bad results at times, but I get those bad results and can fix them in less time than it would take me to even understand what I’m trying to do. I’m a self taught programmer, and I’m most proficient in C and Python, but I’m not as good as most people attempting the same types of things I dabble in. That’s fine.I also do PCBs, schematics, CAD work, foreign languages, raise a kid, etc. I don’t have time to become the programmer that my projects require. I do have the time to work with an LLM and build something that works well enough to call it a success. I love open source. I report bugs. I don’t usually report solutions to those bugs. This is all unlikely to change unless LLMs can produce code that is acceptable for open source submissions.On the Stack Overflow side of things, I’m not upset at all that people are not visiting that horrible site. Do they sometimes have answers to my questions? Yes, but there is no way I’d ever ask another question on there. No one deserves to be belittled, insulted, or treated like a leper because they have a question. Who do they think have questions? Seasoned veterans? Of course not! People who are learning! Yet they claim it’s not a site for learning.The main problem with SO beside all the jerks is their goal is impossible to accomplish without learners providing the questions that they flippantly ignore and insult. No more Stack Overflow? No problem! I managed not to state my opinion about Zephyr so far. Well, I dislike Zephyr more than I dislike Stack Overflow. I would never use it in a personal project, nor would I begin a professional project that uses it. Abstraction is a distraction from the hardware.I don’t want to troubleshoot the framework. I want to troubleshoot my code and hardware. Want to experience something so poorly organized that your head explodes? Try Zephyr. /project/application/build/application/zephyr <– that’s where you find your flashable binaries… unless you use MCUboot, then half of it is ALSO in /project/application/build/mcuboot/zephyr. Make sure you flash them to the correct locations! You also need to modify the board.dts, Kconfig, app.overlay, cmakelist.txt, prj.conf, oh, and I forgot. then you have to program the actual source! Good luck doing anything with that API. It’s a beast! I would not know half of this without the help of an LLM, and I’m only scratching the surface. My last point: people who don’t like LLMs are mostly just the people who feel threatened by them. Are LLMs perfect? Of course not. They’re modeled after humans. Report comment Reply I have to agree with the general idea alot of other commenters are making here.AI is great for removing the mumdane. Its great forngetting the idea out. Especially for small scale projects. You also really need to know how to code to know what to ask for. I would also say a lot of the problems listed are brought on by themselves. There is a reason there are a million memes about every answer on Stack Overflow being “use the search” or “You are doing it 100% wrong (assessed without full context)” or simply “closed, duplicate.” There is also a reason people avoid manuals, because, especiallynfor open source things, then documentation is incredibly crypric and written by someone who has no concept of writing to an audience that isn’t already intimately familiar with the product on a developer level. That or the software only has one install option using some obscure flash in the pan set up that requires 10 other things be installed that may or may not work.Report comment Reply What people don’t realize is that we’ve all been using AI for decades to answer out questions, it just didn’t write English or Python yet: PageRank and the many algorithms that have come since indexed the Internet and found relevant articles according to your search prompt. Stack overflow and Reddit boomed to prominence for a time because they fit what the search engine was looking for.The joke was that being a good programmer really meant being able to use Google and copy from StackOverflow. It became a feedback loop, benefitting these sites, for better or worse, because of their SEO. The Javascript ecosystem has always been a popularity contest, with popular and long-supported libraries being preferred, because you know it will be easier to find answers for. Report comment Reply People used to hate high(er) level compilers since the beginning of it.And LLMs are just a new layer of compiler, that fails like each compiler failed in the past, and will mature into a greater tool day by day. Is better to get used to it than try to fight it. Report comment Reply Interesting thought, and I mostly agree with it. “Mostly agree” because AI is a tool like any other, albeit darn advanced and darn flexible (in its own ways), but any tool is only as good as its user/master.Meaning, if the user is dumb, the tool will cancel the advantages of having one in the first place. Dumb users usually hope the tool will work it out instead of them mastering the craft, and in some/limited number of occasions it will, but statistically speaking those probably wouldn’t make a lasting difference. Report comment Reply OSS programmers love to reinvent the wheel. Now they have a shiny new tool to make that easy.Report comment Reply I don’t entirely agree with the authors; it’s a question of their approach to programming. Vibe coding isn’t the only possible way to work with agents; there’s also Smart coding. I even wrote an article specifically outlining the differences. As for open source, there could be many more good libraries. For example, Go has developed its own professional graphics ecosystem, something no one wanted to write for 16+ years. https://dev.to/kolkov/smart-coding-vs-vibe-coding-engineering-discipline-in-the-age-of-ai-5b20 https://dev.to/kolkov/go-126-meets-2026-with-a-professional-graphics-ecosystem-9g8 https://github.com/kolkov Report comment Reply AI saves me a lot of time compared to parsing StackOverflow for an answer that is almost right, that is anyway copy and pasted into my own own code.The problem I see that will come up in a not soo distant future, is that answers to new problems won’t be available on StackOverflow because of people not asking the questions, and fewer users will be there to answer to them, which means that in turn the AI will also not have the answers. I believe that OSS will only increase due to the fact that more people will be creating tools, and having not used hundreds of hours to write it, they will be keener to share it.Report comment Reply I completely agree. There’s a risk that there will be fewer answers online. But there could be more good code. The key is to use agents correctly, rather than relying on vibe coding—that is, not trusting the agent entirely, but rather guiding it along the desired path. For example, agents were a lifesaver for me when my vision deteriorated after COVID-19.Now, fine print is flaking for me, and it’s become difficult to work with code if there’s a lot of it and I have to write and correct it myself, but I can check the finished code. https://dev.to/kolkov/smart-coding-vs-vibe-coding-engineering-discipline-in-the-age-of-ai-5b20 Report comment Reply I will always respect and remember what StackOverflow was and how it helped countless devs, including myself. Unfortunately, this article is all fear mongering.StackOverflow sold their data to be used as AI training material, essentially signing their own death certificate. Consulting firms are also taking a huge hit because they relied on StackOverflow for their teams of junior devs to write boilerplate code while charging $200/hr. These are the roars of aging tigers. They aren’t offering solutions. They aren’t calling for a vetting process or protocol.They are making a bold claim and cherry picking studies with legacy codebase that fit their narrative. 15 years ago when I got into programming the old guard would say “you guys today don’t even need to build anything anymore, just use a CDN or pull from a repo”. Nothing has changed. These are the death throes of aging tigers.Don’t be scared, the roars are loud but if you listen closely you’ll hear what they’re actually saying… Remember me… Report comment Reply I’d agree with these findings actually because we are using many fewer open source components in Flexiva (a new code base) than Apex (an older code base). We replaced many of the older components with home-grown vibe-coded ones which do only what we require, plus our trained AI generates its own API specifications which suits the way we work.Report comment Reply I think the exact opposite is/will be true. Updating and creating Open Source code will be easier and easier. If I was a for profit software company I would be worried. Report comment Reply I am about to release around 9 open source projects i would never have finished, released or even started if it werent for opus. Including groundwork projects others can build upon.Report comment Reply Leave a ReplyCancel reply Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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Andrii Bidochko

CTO UBOS

Andrii Bidochko is an AI entrepreneur and researcher focused on AI agents, reinforcement learning, and autonomous systems. He writes about the technologies shaping the future of machine intelligence, from frontier models and agent architectures to real-world AI applications.