Further to this, the quality problem is affecting the entire industry, not just FOSS. Anyone working on a large enough team has already seen some contributors pushing slop.
And while banning AI outright is certainly an option at a private company, it also feels like throwing out the baby with the bath water. So we’re all searching for a solution together, I think.
There was a time (decades ago) when projects didn’t need to use pull requests. As the pool of contributors grew, new tools were discovered and applied and made FOSS (and private dev) a better experience overall. This feels like a similar situation.
Isn’t this a form of what he labels the “human coefficient”?
Some businesses prefer tools built by other businesses for some tasks. The author advocates pretty plainly to identify and target those opportunities if that’s your strength.
I think his point is to recognize that’s moving toward a niche rather than the norm (on the spectrum of all software to be built).
It’s moving fast. Just today I noticed Claude Code now ends plans with a reference to the entire prior conversation (as a .jsonl file on disk) with instructions to check that for more details.
Not sure how well it’s working though (my agents haven’t used it yet)
Okay...and continue to work up the levels? Why do you think OAuth might be limiting? Why do you think they started building subagents first? What is the difference between subagents and products like Aider?
If they were able to wrap the API directly, this is relatively easy to implement but they have to do this within Claude Code which is based on giving a prompt/hiding API access. This is obvious if you think carefully about what Claude Code is, what requests it is sending to the API, etc.
I do like the idea of crowd-sourced collections of resources like skills.
It might be more useful if it was an index of skills managed in GitHub. Sort of like GitHub actions which can be browsed in the marketplace[1] but are ultimately just normal git repos.
There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.