According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted. 

Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades. 

Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.

Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.

The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no. 

“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”

This is already happening. Last month, Tailwind Labs—the company behind an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwind Labs is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.

Tailwind Labss head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”

Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.

According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”

The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”

This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”

He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”

AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.

The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software. 

“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”

The Steam Machine was supposed to be out pretty soon, along with the Steam Controller and Steam Frame, but Valve announced today that not only has all this hardware's release been delayed, but that it'll probably be more expensive whenever it comes out, too.

The announcement reads:

When we announced these products in November, we planned on being able to share specific pricing and launch dates by now. But the memory and storage shortages you've likely heard about across the industry have rapidly increased since then.  The limited availability and growing prices of these critical components mean we must revisit our exact shipping schedule and pricing (especially around Steam Machine and Steam Frame).

Our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed. But we have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change. We will keep you updated as much as we can as we finalize those plans as soon as possible.

Those "memory and storage shortages", if you haven't heard about them, are a result of AI data centre usage--or, not even usage, but planned usage--fucking with global production and supply chains so much that the cost of everything from SSDs to RAM has shot through the roof.

Here’s why RAM prices are skyrocketing and SSDs and GPUs could soon follow suit

The answer: AI of course.

PC GamerJacob Fox

This news has moved me from "maybe computer use should be regulated" to "Butlerian Jihad Now" on the radicalisation scale.

Diverse deutsche NGOs und Unternehmen haben im Dezember den “Digital Independence Day” ausgerufen. Am DI.Day, wie es gerne abgekürzt wird, sollen Menschen nicht nur motiviert werden, die digitalen Aspekte ihrer Existenz von vor allem US-basierten Plattformen und Anbietern hin zu anderen Plattformen (z.B. in der EU) zu verschieben sondern es werden auch konkrete Hinweise und Howtos bereitgestellt, wie genau man sich von bestimmten Plattformen befreien kann.

Die Stoßrichtung kann ich absolut verstehen, ich habe vor einigen Tagen ja hier selbst beschrieben, welche Migrationen ich im vergangenen Jahr vorgenommen habe. Mehr solche konkreten Anleitungen sind in jedem Falle hilfreich, um Menschen und Gruppen die Möglichkeit zu geben, ihre digitale Lebenswelt besser zu gestalten. Überhaupt wieder zu gestalten. Sich nicht mehr nur als “user” sondern als gestaltend zu begreifen. Denn das Digitale ist ja an sich fast beliebig formbar, eine Eigenschaft, die zunehmend in Vergessenheit zu geraten scheint.

Allerdings ist das Framing problematisch: “Independence Day”. Man will sich also unabhängig machen. Aber von wem eigentlich?

Auf den ersten Blick gibt es hier einen leicht nationalistischen Spin: Man will sich nicht mehr auf ausländische/außereuropäische Anbieter verlassen müssen. Aber das wäre für den DI.day meiner Meinung nach eine unfaire Lesart. Es geht ja auch viel um Open Source und all das, also generell darum irgendwie unabhängig zu sein. Aber mal ne ketzerische Frage: Geht das überhaupt? Will man das überhaupt wirklich?

Als Mensch zu existieren bedeutet abhängig zu sein. Wir sind als Kinder abhängig von unseren Eltern und Erziehenden, später von unserem sozialen Umfeld, unserem Job, der Arbeit, die viele unbekannte um uns herum erledigen, damit der Laden überhaupt laufen kann: Wir sind niemals unabhängig.

Ich würde sogar weitergehen. Die Art, wie wir in Abhängigkeiten leben, macht uns stark. Bestimmte Arten von gegenseitiger Abhängigkeit sind die Basis von Solidarität und sozialem Zusammenhalt. Zu begreifen, das wir alle einander brauchen ist der erste Schritt um zu verstehen, wie sehr wir uns alle gegenseitig ein gutes Leben schulden.

Das heißt nicht, dass alle Abhängigkeiten gleich sind: Ich bin ein Fan davon, bewußter über Abhängigkeiten nachzudenken und bestimmte davon loszuwerden, falls irgendwie möglich. Aber das darf nicht dazu führen der liberalen Chimäre des komplett unabhängigen Individuums, das rational am Markt oder so operiert, nachzurennen.

Ein besseres Framing wäre meiner Meinung nach das der Einbettung. Mensch sein heißt eingebettet sein in Beziehungen und Abhängigkeiten. Und diese gilt es möglichst gut zu gestalten, spezielle Abhängigkeiten zu reduzieren und durch andere zu ersetzen, die fairer, menschlicher, repektvoller sind.

Wir sind niemals unabhängig. Aber das heißt nicht, dass wir bestimmte Abhängigkeiten akzeptieren sollten. Ein gutes Leben ist ein Leben in guten sozialen Verbindungen. Guten Abhängigkeiten halt.

This cartoon is drawn by new guest artist Jamie Sale, who did a terrific job.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each of the panels shows a businessman in a suit grinning as he speaks to us.

PANEL 1

A close up of a businessman grinning. In the background, a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds.

MAN: A.I. Is the defining tech of our time! Microsoft and amazon and facebook and google have spent almost a trillion dollars on A.I.!

PANEL 2

The camera has pulled back a little. We can see the man is holding a bubble blower, bubbles streaming from it.

MAN: Has A.I. made a profit? Not yet, but… Someday we’ll figure out something A.I. can do that actually makes money! It definitely might could happen!

PANEL 3

The man continues grinning, pumping his fist, as the air around him turns gray and forbidding and the bubbles stream out.

MAN: In the meantime, We have to prepare! By spending more billions building more A.I. data centers so we can spend trillions more so that someday A.I. can do… Um…

PANEL 4

We can now see that the man is talking to a huge bubble floating in the air. The bubble has been packed fill with ordinary looking people, shoved in like sardines in a can. They looked panicked and unhappy.

MAN: Anyway, A.I. is certainly possibly maybe not going to pop and take down the whole economy! You’ve got nothing to worry about!

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

“Chicken fat” is old-fashioned cartoonist lingo for little extras in the art.

Panel 2 – In a tiny window in a cloud is a tiny, teeny silhouette of a spy with binoculars.

Panel 3 – One of the bubbles has a mouse in it.

Panel 4 – One of the bubbles has a “for rent” sign.

The A.I. Bubble | Patreon

After a lot of turmoil and their most vocal user base protesting about how Mozilla keeps pushing “AI” into the browser in many weird ways they now released the “AI Killswitch” they have been talking about for a while.

Which is good. Those features should have been “opt-in” from the start and it’s kinda weird how users of a Browser that frames itself as the resistance against “Big Tech” need to fight it tooth and nail to not push Big Tech’s vision of a slop future onto them. But I digress.

Mozilla’s blog post reminded me of why I always but “AI” in scarequotes: I do not think that “AI” mean any specific or defined technology or type of artifact but is mostly an empty signifier. It means whatever you want it to mean at some point. An LLM. An Excel macro. A bunch of people in a call center in India. A bunch of slides in a slide deck full of false promises.

(If “AI” means anything it means the assignment of agency to a supposedly existing piece of technology. So a disenfranchisement of human beings mostly.)

Mozilla outlines the different kinds of features (all called “AI”) that the kill switch allows you to disable:

And this made me think. Because these features are very much not the same.

Sure, all might technology-wise have similar bases in neural networks but from the user perspective they are qualitatively different.

“Translations” and even “Alt text in PDFs” are basically accessibility features: They try to empower you the user to be able to access information you otherwise might not be able to, at the cost of it probably being a low quality version of it. I think that there is a good case to be made for integrating that kind of functionality into a browser: Browsers are tools for information retrieval. (Let’s leave the question of whether it is possible to built these systems on LLMs or similar models ethically aside for a second. Even though I don’t believe it is possible without exploiting the work of many Internet users against their consent.) But is that “AI”? The “wonderful” future of the “agentic web” and all the retro-futurist leanings about smart fridges that entails? It feels smaller, less grandiose. As I said, it’s a feature that in general makes sense. A button you can click to get some version of the web page in front of you that otherwise you wouldn’t have had. And it saves you from having to paste the URL into one of the many translation engines we’ve had on the web for decades.

Let’s jump to the last point: “AI Chatbot in the Sidebar”. Not much I need to tell you there, that is what many people will call “AI” and “intelligence” because the biggest marketing campaign ever has turned a stochastic word generator into the Avatar of what many people consider intelligence. There are very different statistics about how popular these things actually are, how much people really use it but let’s even say that these things are very popular and used a lot (which I am not convinced of looking at how people at work or in my social circles use “AI” – if they do at all): This is not a lot of work for Mozilla. Extensions that integrate other tools into the Firefox Sidebar have existed for a long, long time. This is just another one of those, just way more insecure than what’s usually going on there.

But “AI-enhanced tab grouping” and “AI link previews” are a bit of a different beast IMO. They are more deeply integrated into the browser itself and want to shape more of how you use it in general. But: I wonder who actually uses that kind of stuff? Who uses tab groups? It’s a very advanced feature that’s also not very discoverable. I use it and I know a few very technical people who do but most do not even know of its existence. And sure, you can try to make it a bit easier to slap a label on a tab group but is that worth the effort? For that small a user base? I also made a quick poll on mastodon (a very tech-savvy and -interested crowd) asking how many people even know that that “AI link previews” even exists and more than 60% had no idea.

So of the three “AI-ish” features one is basically just an embedded external tool but two are something Mozilla actually works on and does product development and implementation. But those are features that feel like they only target very small groups. And not in a positive “this is a marginalized group that we are trying to support” but in a “a few power users might even be aware that this exists” kind of way.

Now features sometimes grow and take time to find an audience. I still remember how long it took for people to embrace tabs in browsers for example. (And many people still have horrible workflows with them. Where the tab bar just grows with the same tabs and if I have to watch some people use a browser I need a few rounds of therapy afterwards.)

But I wondered, why all these things are being summarized as “AI” when they are so radically different. Firefox having a Sidebar that allows you to interact with Mastodon does not make Firefox a “Fediverse Browser” for example, why does a chatbot sidebar get to define what the browser is?

Of course it’s a bit of marketing. Mozilla hasn’t for a long time been able to stand firm against hype and focus on normal engineering and development. It’s FOMO to a degree.

But it also reminded me of the way that conversations with Mozilla about their “AI” focus keep going: Whether it’s on Mastodon or reddit or in some other very Firefoxy/open source aligned community the polls always point to users dominantly not wanting Mozilla to focus on “AI” but on improving the browser, on picking up the policy work that they dropped a few years ago. On wanting Mozilla to fight for the open web and the people living in it. The Mozilla response is usually: But the users want “AI”.

But do they? And if they do, what “AI”?

Do most users really ask Mozilla to build an “AI” label generator for a feature they don’t even know exits? Is that what their data shows?

Or is it some some people use the built-in translations and by labeling those “AI” Mozilla claims that people really want “AI link previews”?

This is another example of the term “AI” hiding more than it explains. But it also is a pattern I see more and more where “AI” companies point at one specific feature people actually might use (for better or worse) and using that to legitimize all kinds of other shit that has nothing to do with it but maybe implementation details.

If we want to have useful conversations about systems, features, their uses and their impacts we should just drop the “AI” label. It’s not useful, it’s only poisoning discourse and making us all dumber – even if we do not use chatbots. (But double if you do.)