Conceding your agency to agents may hurt.
DaAnalyst
derek-zhou
Allow me to generalize: Your problem is not about AI per se, but about advanced tooling took the agency away from the practitioners, turning them from masters of their crafts into slaves of the tools. It happened 200 years ago for blacksmiths, 20 years ago for circuit designers, and now for programmers.
So it is just another industry revolution then; humanity itself is not at risk. We had a good run; now we just need to survive being obsolete.
3
DaAnalyst
Because you may only ever steal/tax/confiscate someone’s past. You can’t steal the assets (features) they yet plan to develop.
2
OndrejValenta
Well, this is something that I tell myself before I go to bed, “you still have something to offer to the world (so they can copy it and you stay a nobody)” 
2
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
⅓ of my code approx was released to my employer and paid instantly.
⅔ of my code was released directly to the public domain under the most permissive licenses.
I honestly don’t see how is this to change because of AI. You (or anyone else) could literally steal^W take my code as is, rename it, if required, and sell it. Yesterday, 10 years ago, 20 years ago.
1
OndrejValenta
No, no.. yes, as junior developer/amateur/even professional, I could steal your code even before AI, but I had to learn what it does, and if there was something wrong with it I was stuck, I had to learn a lot of what you know and that takes time, money and energy.. today, I say “hey claude, look at this repo, I like it, do the same for me, we are going to add one feature i want” and he will do it, gladly, because you are hooked. It feels so easy and cheap to copy your work that it makes no sense to use your solution and give you credit
4
tfwright
This one resonated a lot. I am very lucky to be part of a small company/team where I am responsible for most technical direction, but even being pretty ideally situated to manage this it has been a bit rocky. I have been mostly successful in maintaining most code quality standards (and even raising them in some areas!) but it is more and more undeniable that I myself have lost a lot of motivation in this area and I’m not even sure why. It feels like the decline of software as a craft is inevitable at the macro level, so spending a lot of energy defending it in my little corner of the internet seems pretty meaningless, and I’m usually a romantic about these things. Maybe I just don’t care as much about software as I thought I did
2
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
I could not care less about others to use my solution or giving me credit. Credit is literally the last reason for me to publish to OSS.
4
derek-zhou
Open source is dead. If anyone publish source code for outside contributions, influence, and fame, eventually hoping for monetization, then tough luck. On the other hand, the spirit of free (as in free speech) software lives on. In true free software, one scratches their own itches and publish source code because why not.
3
mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
Exactly. And there come outside contributions, influence, and fame, let alone an eventual hope for monetization.
Always has been that way.
0