Coding agents could make free software matter again

https://www.gjlondon.com/blog/ai-agents-could-make-free-software-matter-again/

by rogueleaderr • 4 months ago

272 303 4 months ago

floathub• 4 months ago

Free software has never mattered more.

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc., etc., etc. And one can easily see a day where something like a local sort Claude Code talking to Open Weight and Open Source models is the core dev tool.

TacticalCoder• 4 months ago

All the infrastructure that runs the whole AI-over-the-internet juggernaut is essentially all open source.

Exactly.

Heck, even Claude Code would be far less useful without grep, diff, git, head, etc.

It wouldn't even work. It's constantly using those.

I remember reading a Claude Code CLI install doc and the first thing was "we need ripgrep" with zero shame.

All these tools also all basically run on top of Linux: with Claude Code actually installing, on Windows and MacOS, a full linux VM on the system.

It's all open-source command line tools, an open-source OS and piping program one to the other. I'm on Linux on the desktop (and servers ofc) since the Slackware days... And I was right all along.

gesis• 4 months ago

The primary selling point of unix and unix-like operating systems has always been composability.

Without the ability to string together the basic utilities into a much greater sum, Unix would have been another blip.

CobrastanJorji• 4 months ago

It's not just that open source code is useful in an age of AI, it's that the AI could only have been made because of the open source code.

andoando2• 4 months ago

Why isnt LLM training itself open sourced? With all the compute in the world, something like Folding@home here would be killer

DesaiAshu2• 4 months ago

data bandwidth limits distributed training under current architectures. really interesting implications if we can make progress on that

throwaway274484• 4 months ago

It's either illegal or extremely expensive to source quality training material.

mike_hearn2• 4 months ago

It is in some cases. NVIDIA's models are open source, in the truest sense that you can download the training set and training scripts and make your own.

doctorwho42• 4 months ago

Well it is, it's in the name "OpenAI". /S

PaulDavisThe1st• 4 months ago

Free software has never mattered more.

But the Libre part of Free Software has never mattered less, at least so TFA argues and while I could niggle with the point, it's not wrong.

pwdisswordfishy• 4 months ago

Wow, some corps could offload some of their costs to "the community" (unpair labor), while end users are as disenfranchised as ever! How validating!

threethirtytwo8• 4 months ago

I think the opposite. It will make all software matter less.

If trendlines continue... It will be faster for AI to vibe code said software to your customized specifications than to sign up for a SaaS and learn it.

"Claude, create a project management tool that simplifies jira, customize it to my workflow."

So a lot of apps will actually become closed source personalized builds.

SchemaLoad3• 4 months ago

And then you get a new hire who already knows the common SaaS products but has to re learn your vibe coded version no one else uses where no information exists online.

There is a reason why large proprietary products remain prevalent even when cheaper better alternatives exist. Being "industry standard" matters more than being the best.

ares623• 4 months ago

As the kids say: "let them cook"

threethirtytwo8• 4 months ago

The new hire will just vibe code a new solution that translates your solution into something he prefers. Every new hire will have his own.

uduni• 4 months ago

There's too much value in familiar UX. "Don't make the user think" is the golden rule these days. People used to have mental bandwidth for learning new interfaces... But now people expect uniformity

ahartmetz• 4 months ago

They expect low complexity. Uniformity has greatly declined in the last 30 years or so. How do you even tell what is or isn't clickable, ffs?

zadikian• 4 months ago

But then all your local stuff is based on open-source software, unlike the SaaS which is probably not all the way open.

I've always preferred my stack to be on the thinner, more vanilla, less prebuilt side than others around me, and seems like LLMs are reinforcing that approach now.

nine_k• 4 months ago

When you want reliable, battle-tested software, you will notice the difference.

wmeredith• 4 months ago

Implying that JIRA is reliable is... something.

Joel_Mckay• 4 months ago

Due to copyright laws and piracy bleed-through, one can't safely license "AI" output under some other use-case without the risk of getting sued or DMCA strikes. You can't make it GPL, or closed source... because it is not legally yours even if you paid someone for tokens.

Like all code-generators that came before, the current LLM will end up a niche product after the hype-cycle ends. "AI" only works if the models are fed other peoples real works, and the web is already >52% nonsense now. They add the Claude-contributor/flag to Git projects, so the scrapers don't consume as much of its own slop. ymmv =3

coffeefirst2• 4 months ago

This isn’t going to happen.

I can already build a ticket tracker in a weekend. I’ve been on many teams that used Jira, nobody loves Jira, none of us ever bothered to DIY something good enough.

Why?

Because it’s a massive distraction. It’s really fun to build all these side apps, but then you have to maintain them.

I’m guessing a lot of vibeware will be abandoned rather than maintained.

threethirtytwo8• 4 months ago

Who said you’re building it? You’re telling your AI to build it while you go play golf or something.

not_paid_by_yt7• 4 months ago

if the trendlines continue on atmospheric greenhouse gases we will all be dead from climate change so I really do hope the world is a little bit more complicated than trendlines just extrapolating out. Interestingly enough that might actually be bad for OpenAI since it will be difficult to sell their product if their customers are dying from heat stroke.

threethirtytwo8• 4 months ago

You hope. But you need to think realistically. Not hopefully.

Trendlines will continue. Even the one for greenhouse gases. That is the most realistic scenario. In fact the trendline for greenhouse gases is even stronger than AI. I am far more confident about greenhouse gases continuing to rise than I am for AI.

Telling me how another trendline points to a shitty reality doesn't change the fact that the shitty reality is still reality. It's a common mistake in debate.

I haven't stated whether I hope for one reality or the other. I'm simply stating the most probable future. You haven't even disagreed with me.

pdntspa• 4 months ago

What's the chance this website is powered by postgresql?

girvo• 4 months ago

Hopefully low, it's a static blog.

(I know this isn't the actual point of your comment, apologies!)

keeler• 4 months ago

It's a WordPress blog & backed by MySQL.

SchemaLoad3• 4 months ago

Maybe, but I don't really believe users can or want to start designing software, if it was even possible which today it isn't really unless you already have software dev skills.

That would basically make users a product manager and UX designer, which they aren't really capable of currently. At most they will discover what they think they want isn't what they actually want.

Bockit2• 4 months ago

It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.

$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.

Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.

Crye• 4 months ago

Couldn't agree more. I'm building open source software for the grid, contributing in a way that feels like it could truly make a difference, while building momentum for open standards. It doesn't feel like work, just creativity and problem solving. On top of that, I can just build stuff for fun. Kids want a Minecraft mod? Let's build it and learn a thing or two on the way.

wickedsight• 4 months ago

Where/how do you host your family apps to have them conveniently available to your household? This is the thing I'm struggling with most.

Bockit2• 4 months ago

I have a Mac mini and I put every device that needs access on Tailscale

rkuykendall-com• 4 months ago

I have a Synology NAS I can push docker images to. The key is to set up the docker image so it does a git pull on start, that way I just push to Github and restart it.

This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings.

If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.

heliumtera• 4 months ago

Oh yeah, sure, nothing scream freedom louder than following anthropic and openai suggestions without a second thought.

FergusArgyll• 4 months ago

tl-didn't finish but I absolutely do this already. Much of the software I use is foss and codex adjusts it to my needs. Sometimes it's really good software and I end up adding something that already exists. Whatever, tokens are free...

woeirua3• 4 months ago

I’m not so sure… what I see as more likely is that coding agents will just strip parts from open source libraries to build bespoke applications for users. Users will be ecstatic because they get exactly what they want and they don’t have to worry about upstream supply chain attacks. Maintainers get screwed because no one contributes back to the main code base. In the end open source software becomes critical to the ecosystem, but gets none of the credit.

sigbottle2• 4 months ago

But the users would have to maintain their own forks then. Unless you stream back patches into your forks, which implies there's some upstream being maintained. Software doesn't interoperate and maintain itself for free - somebody's gotta put in the time for that.

I think as long as AI isn't literal AGI, social pressures will keep projects alive, in some state. There definitely is something scary about stealing entire products as a mean for new market domination - e.g. steal linux then make a corporate linux, and force everybody to contribute to corporate linux only (many linux contributors are paid by corporations, after all), and make that the new central pointer. That might be worst case scenario - then Microsoft, in collusion (which I admit is far fetched, but def possible), could completely adopt linux for servers and headless compute, and enforce very strict hardware restrictions such that only Windows works.

LegionMammal9782• 4 months ago

But the users would have to maintain their own forks then.

I suppose the idea would be, they don't have to maintain it: if it ever starts to rot from whatever environmental changes, then they can just get the LLM to patch it, or at worst, generate it again from scratch.

(And personally, I prefer writing code so that it isn't coupled so tightly to the environment or other people's fast-moving libraries to begin with, since I don't want to poke at all of my projects every other year just to keep them functional.)

woeirua3• 4 months ago

Agents can clearly strip out functionality from libraries already. They can certainly backport patches to whatever parts you strip out.

The advantage of decoupling from supply chain attacks is so large that I expect this to be standard practice as soon as later this year.

apatheticonion8• 4 months ago

Having over a decade of open source software I've written freely available online, I actually really appreciate the value that AI && LLMs have provided me.

The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the fact that my works were likely included in the training data and, if it doesn't violate my licenses (GNU 2/3), it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works.

I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.

I wish I could be provided a dividend or royalty, however small, for my contribution to these LLMs but that will never happen.

I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.

I'm guessing that such a license would not be enforceable because I am not in the US, but at least it would be nice to declare my intent and who knows what the future looks like.

bluefirebrand2• 4 months ago

I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that

Frankly do you think AI companies have even the remotest amount of respect for these licenses anyways? They will simply take your code if it is publicly scrapeable, train their models, exactly like they have so far. Then it will be up to you to chase them down and try to sue or whatever. And good luck proving the license violation

I dunno. I just don't really believe that many tech companies these days are behaving even remotely ethically. I don't have much hope that will change anytime soon

apatheticonion8• 4 months ago

I wonder if there is a "loaded" lawsuit here that could be a win-win for license enforcement case law in LLMs.

Take a litigious company like Nintendo. If one was to train an LLM on their works and the LLM produces an emulator, that would force a lawsuit.

If Nintendo wins, then LLMs are stealing. If Nintendo loses, then we can decompile everything.

archagon3• 4 months ago

Traditionally, large corporations have taken very conservative legal stances with regard to integrating e.g. A/GPL code, even when there's almost no risk.

If my license explicitly says "any LLM output trained on this code is legally tainted," I feel like BigAICorp would be foolish to ignore it. Maybe I couldn't sue them today, but are they confident this will remain the case 5, 10, 20 years from now? Everywhere in the world?

advael6• 4 months ago

I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms. Of course, it also seems clear in the present landscape that the law often depends more on the convenience of the powerful than its actual construction and intent, but I would love to be proven wrong about that, and this kind of outcome would help

BobbyJo• 4 months ago

If the rise of Draft Kings and Polymarket/Kalshi have taught me anything, it's that the law becomes meaningless at scale. Sad.

apatheticonion8• 4 months ago

I'm struggling to parse the double negative in that statement, haha.

Are you saying that you believe that untested but technically; models trained on GPL sources need to distribute the resulting LLMs under GPL?

hparadiz6• 4 months ago

Derivative work.

throwaway274484• 4 months ago

Intellectual property never made much sense to begin with. But it certainly makes no sense now, where the common creator has no protections against greedy corporate giants who are happy to wield the full weight of the courts to stifle any competition for longer than we'll be alive.

Or, in the case of LLMs, recklessly swing about software they don't understand while praying to find a business model.

cogman102• 4 months ago

If there was going to be a case, it's derivative works. [1]

What makes it all tricky for the courts is there's not a good way to really identify what part the generated code is a derivative of (except in maybe some extreme examples).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work

not_paid_by_yt7• 4 months ago

That's always what laws existed for, a law is just a formal way of saying "we will use violence against you if you do something we don't like" and that has always going to be primary written by and for the people that already have the power to do that, it's not the worst, certainly better than Kings just being able to do as they please.

tpmoney7• 4 months ago

I think there's no meaningful case by the letter of the law that use of training data that include GPL-licensed software in models that comprise the core component of modern LLMs doesn't obligate every producer of such models to make both the models and the software stack supporting them available under the same terms.

Why do you think "fair use" doesn't apply in this case? The prior Bartz vs Anthropic ruling laid out pretty clearly how training an AI model falls within the realm of fair use. Authors Guild vs Google and Authors Guild vs HathiTrust were both decided much earlier and both found that digitizing copyrighted works for the sake of making them searchable is sufficiently transformative to meet the standards of fair use. So what is it about GPL licensed software that you feel would make AI training on it not subject to the same copyright and fair use considerations that apply to books?

jonahss• 4 months ago

I feel kind of good knowing that my code, design decisions, styles, are now part of the data shaping all software now.

__loam• 4 months ago

I can't eat good feelings

faksr• 4 months ago

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. The cannibalistic $trillion companies profit from it all and no one opted in.

There are also people who want to be eaten by a literal cannibal. I say, no thanks.

apatheticonion8• 4 months ago

Me too, and I use LLMs often for personal and professional work. Knowing that colleagues are burning through $700/day worth of tokens, and a small fraction of those tokens were likely derived from my work while I get made redundant is a bit shite.

micromacrofoot• 4 months ago

a comforting thought but I have bills to pay

gerdesj• 4 months ago

Taken to a hallucinated but logical conclusion, we might define a word such as "cene" to riff off of "meme" and "gene".

The c is for code. If adopted we could spend forever arguing how the c is pronounced and whether the original had a cedilla, circonflex or rhymes with bollocks, which seems somehow appropriate. Everyone uses xene instead. x is chi but most people don't notice.

koolba• 4 months ago

Reading this I hear The Roots playing The Seed 2.0[1] in my mind.

It’s a wild thought to think that of all the things that will remain on this earth after you’re gone, it’ll be your GPL contributions reconstituting themselves as an LLM’s hallucinations.

[1] https://youtu.be/ojC0mg2hJCc

hparadiz6• 4 months ago

Me too! I'm glad I'm not the only one.

achierius• 4 months ago

I'm sure you'll feel that way so long as you have an income.

vips7L2• 4 months ago

You feel good that you got to contribute to these parasitic capitalists?

phendrenad26• 4 months ago

I wish Anthropic or someone would take a leadership role and re-train their models without any GPL code, or at least stop doing so in the future tense.

worthless-trash3• 4 months ago

What would they learn from then ?

reactordev• 4 months ago

If you use GitHub, you’re automatically opted into having your code used for training. Private repo or not. You have to actually opt out and even then, will they honor that? No…

Waterluvian• 4 months ago

They’ll just keep “accidentally” resetting the option over time.

otras• 4 months ago

The foreman had pointed out his best man - what was his name? - and, joking with the puzzled machinist, the three bright young men had hooked up the recording apparatus to the lathe controls. Hertz! That had been the machinist's name - Rudy Hertz, an old-timer, who had been about ready to retire. Paul remembered the name now, and remembered the deference the old man had shown the bright young men.

Afterward, they'd got Rudy's foreman to let him off, and, in a boisterous, whimsical spirit of industrial democracy, they'd taken him across the street for a beer. Rudy hadn't understood quite what the recording instruments were all about, but what he had understood, he'd liked: that he, out of thousands of machinists, had been chosen to have his motions immortalized on tape. And here, now, this little loop in the box before Paul, here was Rudy as Rudy had been to his machine that afternoon - Rudy, the turner-on of power, the setter of speeds, the controller of the cutting tool. This was the essence of Rudy as far as his machine was concerned, as far as the economy was concerned, as far as the war effort had been concerned. The tape was the essence distilled from the small, polite man with the big hands and black fingernails; from the man who thought the world could be saved if everyone read a verse from the Bible every night; from the man who adored a collie for want of children; from the man who . . . What else had Rudy said that afternoon? Paul supposed the old man was dead now - or in his second childhood in Homestead.

Now, by switching in lathes on a master panel and feeding them signals from the tape, Paul could make the essence of Rudy Hertz produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand of the shafts.

Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano

archagon3• 4 months ago

I've been looking for a copy-left "source available" license that allows me to distribute code openly but has a clause that says "if you would like to use these sources to train an LLM, please contact me and we'll work something out". I haven't yet found that.

Personally, I want a viral (GPL-style) license that explicitly prohibits use of code for LLM training/tuning purposes — with the asterisk that while current law might view LLM training as fair use, this may not be the case forever, and blatant disregard of the terms of the license should make it easier for me to sue offenders in the future.

Alternatively, this could be expressed as: the output of any LLM trained on this code must retain this license.

rpdillon• 4 months ago

My personal take is that LLMs are so transformative that they are likely not going to qualify under derivative works and therefore GPL wouldn't hold sway. There's already some evidence that courts will consider training on copyrighted material fair use, so long as it is otherwise obtained legally, which would be the case with software licensed under GPL.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion on HN, but I believe it is best because it's a weakener interpretation of copyright law, which is overall a good thing in my view.

apatheticonion8• 4 months ago

I wonder if that would extend to training LLMs on decompiled firmware. A new clean room method unlocked?

hparadiz6• 4 months ago

You can train models locally now and use open source ones and there's a robust community of people training, retraining, and generally pulling data from anywhere. And then new models get trained on old models. The models in use now are already several generations deep even further trained on code freely given by the entire industry. It's like complaining about being 1/100000th of a soup with no real proof you're even in it. Can you provide proof that a model used your code? It's like a remix of a remix of a remix.

visarga2• 4 months ago

it certainly feels against the spirit of what I intended when distributing my works

You can own the works, but not the vibes. If everyone owned the vibes we would all be infringing others. In my view abstractions should not be protected by copyright, only expression, currently the abstraction-filtration-comparison standard (AFC) protects abstractions too, non-literal infringement is a thing.

Trying to own the vibes is like trying to own the functionality itself, no matter the distinct implementation details, and this is closer to patents than copyrights. But patents get researched for prior art and have limited duration, copyright is automatic and almost infinite duration.

birdfood• 4 months ago

These companies pirated their training material and reached settlements with the copyright holders. I imagine they’d do the same with software licenced under Not For Training terms too. It’d be up to you to find out it is happening and then pursue them legally for compensation.

6274673• 4 months ago

I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.

I think anyone here can understand and even share that feeling. And I agree with your "questionable" - its just the lame HR excuse du jour.

My 2c:

- AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are. the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.

- It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary. In a world of autonomous agents and open-weight models, control is decentralized.inference costs continue to drop, you dont need to be running on megacorp stacks. Millions (billions?) of agents finding and sharing among themselves. How will megacorps stop?

- I see the advent of LLMs like the spread of literacy. Scribes once held a monopoly on the written word, which felt like a "loss" to them when reading/writing became universal. But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

j_bum• 4 months ago

I’m not sure if the analogy is yours, but the scribe note really struck a chord with me.

I’m not a professionally trained SWE (I’m a scientist who does engineering work). LLMs have really accelerated my ability to build, ideate, and understand systems in a way that I could only loosely gain from sometimes grumpy but mostly kind senior engineers in overcrowded chat rooms.

The legality of all of this is dubious, though, per the parent. I GPL licensed my FOSS scientific software because I wanted it to help advance biomedical research. Not because I wanted it to help a big corp get rich.

But then again, maybe code like mine is what is holding these models back lol.

wiseowise3• 4 months ago

We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

LLMs making the ability to code a universal human “literacy” is like saying that Markov chain is making the ability to write a universal human “literacy”.

ori_b3• 4 months ago

We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

The same way that doordash makes kitchen skills universal.

latexr4• 4 months ago

AI megacorps aren't the only ones gaining, we all are.

No, no we are not.

the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago.

I don’t want more “leverage to build and ship”, I want to live in a world where people aren’t so disconnected from reality and so lonely they have romantic relationships with a chat window; where they don’t turn off their brains and accept any wrong information because it comes from a machine; where propaganda, mass manipulation, and surveillance aren’t at the ready hands of any two-bit despot; where people aren’t so myopic that they only look at their own belly button and use case for a tool that they are incapable of recognising all the societal harms around them.

We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

No, no we are not. What we are, however, is making ever increasingly bad comparisons.

Literacy implies understanding. To be able to read and write, you need to be able to understand how to do both. LLMs just spit text which you don’t need to understand at all, and increasingly people are not even caring to try to understand it. LLM generated code in the hands of someone who doesn’t read it is the opposite of literacy.

wolvesechoes5• 4 months ago

the leverage you have to build and ship today is higher than it was five years ago

Wake me up when you do.

matheusmoreira2• 4 months ago

It feels like megacorps own the keys right now, but that’s a temporary.

Remains to be seen. Hardware prices are increasing. Manufacturers are abandoning the consumer sector to serve the all consuming AI demands. Not to mention the constant attempts to lock down the computers so that we don't own them.

What does the future hold for us? Unknown. It's not looking too good though. What good is hardware if we're priced out? What good are open models and free software if we're unable to run them?

Underqualified• 4 months ago

This response sounds an awful lot like what ChatGPT would say ...

psychoslave• 4 months ago

But today, language belongs to everyone. We aren't losing code; we are making the ability to code a universal human "literacy."

Literacy require training though. It’s not the same to be able to make voice rendition of a text, understand what the text is about, have a critical analysis toolbox of texts, and having the habit to lookup for situated within a broader inferred context.

Just throwing LLMs into people hands won’t automatically make them able to use it in relevant manner as far as global social benefits can be considered.

The literacy issue is actually quite independent of the fact that LLMs used are distributed or centralised.

oblio4• 4 months ago

Once creation is commodotized, controlling eye balls is king. Look up aggregators. Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.

If anything, in Extremistan we're all useless. Platforms and whales are all that matters.

strogonoff• 4 months ago

I was made redundant recently "due to AI" (questionable) and it feels like my works in some way contributed to my redundancy where my works contributed to the profits made by these AI megacorps while I am left a victim.

This is increasingly common, and I don’t think it’s questionable that LLMs that software engineers help train are contributing to the obsolescence of software engineers. Large companies that operate these LLMs both 1) benefit from the huge amount of open-source software and at the same time 2) erode the very foundation that made open-source software explode in popularity (which happened thanks to copyright—or, more precisely, the ability to use copyright to enforce copyleft and thus protect the future of volunteer work made by individual contributors).

GPL was written long before this technology started to be used this way. There’s little doubt that the spirit of GPL is violated at scale by commercial LLM operators, and considering the amount of money that got sunk into this it’s very unlikely they would ever yield to the public the models, the ability to mass-scrape the entire Internet to train equivalent models, the capability to run these models to obtain comparable results, etc. The claim of “democratising knowledge” is disingenuous if you look deeper into it—somehow, they themselves will always be exempt from that democratisation and free to profit from our work, whereas our work is what gets “democratised”. Somehow, this strikes me personally more as expropriation than democratisation.

thn-gap• 4 months ago

You can't avoid big corps training on your data if it's available, because "fair use".

But I hope this same 'fair use' will allow distilling of their private models into open weight models, so users are never locked in into any particular vendor. Giving back power to the user.

samiv• 4 months ago

The other day I was working with some shaders GLSL signed distance field functions. I asked Claude to review the code and it immediately offered to replace some functions with "known solutions". Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.

His work is available with a permissible license on the Internet but somehow it doesn't seem right that a tool will just regurgitate someone else's work without any mention of copyright or license or original authorship.

Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own. Disgusting.

mapcars• 4 months ago

Pre-LLM world one would at least have had to search for this information, find the site, understand the license and acknowledge who the author is. Post LLM the tool will just blatantly plagiarize someone else work which you can then sign off on as your own

These don't contradict each other though, you could "blatantly plagiarize someone else work" before as well. LLMs just add another layer in between.

virtualritz• 4 months ago

Turns out those functions were basically a verbatim copy of Inigo Quilez's work.

Are they? A lot of these were used by people >20 years before Inigo wrote his blog posts. I wrote RenderMan shaders for VFX in the 90's professionally; you think about the problem, you "discover" (?) the math.

So they were known because they were known (a lot of them are also trivial).

Inio's main credit is for cataloging them, especially the 3D ones, and making this knowledge available in one place, excellently presented.

And of course, Shadertoy and the community and giving this knowledge a stage to play out in that way. I would say no one deserves more credit for getting people hooked on shader writing and proceduralism in rendering than this man.

But I would not feel bad about the math being regurgiated by an LLM.

There were very few people writing shaders (mostly for VFX, in RenderMan SL) in the 90's and after.

So apart from the "Texturing and Modeling -- A Procedural Approach" book, the "The RenderMan Companion" and "Advanced RenderMan", there was no literature. The GPU Gems series closed some gaps in later years.

The RenderMan Repository website was what had shader source and all pattern stuff was implict (what we call 2D SDFs today) beause of the REYES architecture of the renderers.

But knowledge about using SDFs in shaders mostly lived in people's heads. Whoever would write about it online would thus get quoted by an LLM.

panxm• 4 months ago

LLMs have already told you these are "known solutions", which implicitly means they are established, non-original approaches. So the key point is really on the user side—if you simply ask one more question, like where these "known solutions" come from, the LLM will likely tell you that these formulas are attributed to Inigo Quilez.

So in my view, if you treat an LLM as a tool for retrieving knowledge or solutions, there isn't really a problem here. And honestly, the line between "knowledge" and "creation" can be quite blurry. For example, when you use Newton's Second Law (F = ma), you don't explicitly state that it comes from Isaac Newton every time—but that doesn't mean you're not respecting his contribution.

m4rtink4• 4 months ago

Yeah, I find this super rude - in this example, the author distributed the code under a very permissive license, basically just wanting you to cite him as an author.

BAM, the LLM just strips all that out, basically pretending it just conjured an elegant solution from the thin air.

No wonder some people started calling the current generation of "AI" plagiarism machines - it really seems more fitting by the day.

jacquesm2• 4 months ago

And even if it would be enforceable, would you be able and willing to go through the energy and monetary expenses to enforce it? Especially against a big corporation willing to fight you.

snarfy• 4 months ago

It shouldn't be needed. I would argue that is more than "against the spirit" and should not be considered fair use. Instead of creating a derivative work, they created a machine that creates derivative works.

mike_hearn2• 4 months ago

FWIW, a lot of open source caused other people to lose their jobs too, all pre AI. So what goes around comes around. The Free Software movement was from day one built on cloning proprietary programs - UNIX was a commercial OS that AT&T sold, the early Linux desktop environments all looked exactly like a mashup of Windows 95 and commercial DEs, etc. Every commercial UNIX got wiped out except Apple, do you think that didn't lead to layoffs? Because it very much did. Nor did it ever really change. SystemD started out as "heavily inspired" by Launch Services. Wayland is basically the same ideas as SkyLight in macOS, etc.

And who was it who benefited from this stuff? A lot of the benefit went to "megacorps" who took the savings and banked the higher profits.

So I don't think open source, which for many years was unashamedly about just cloning designs that were funding other people's salaries, can really cry too much about LLMs. And I say that as someone who has written a lot of open source software, including working on Wine.

mghackerlady4• 4 months ago

Fwiw, AIX and to a far lesser extent Solaris still exist. I'm not exactly sure why people are using them (AIX I can maybe understand because "no one got fired for buying IBM" or whatever but there really isn't any excuse to be running Solaris nowadays since ZFS runs on Linux and and 2 of the BSD based systems and oracle seems desperate to let it die)

leandro-person• 4 months ago

I’m impressed by how current times make us consider so many completely opposite scenarios. I think it can indeed foster progress, but it can also have negative impacts.

jongjong2• 4 months ago

Unfortunately for me, I believe that the algorithms won't allow me to get exposure for my work no matter how good it is so there is literally no benefit for me to do open source. Though I would love to, I'm not in a position to work for free. Exposure is required to monetize open source. It has to reach a certain scale of adoption.

The worst part is building something open source, getting positive feedback, helping a couple of startups and then some big corporation comes along and implements a similar product and then everyone gets forced by their bosses to use the corporate product against their will and people eventually forget your product exists because there are no high-paying jobs allowing people to use it.

With hindsight, Open Source is basically a con for corporations to get free labor. When you make software free for everyone, really you're just making it free for corporations to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... They invest a huge amount of effort to suppress the sources of the ideas.

Our entire system is heavily optimized for decoupling products from their makers. We have almost no idea who is making any of the products we buy. I believe there is a reason for that. Open source is no different.

When we lived in caves, everyone in the tribe knew who caught the fish or who speared the buffalo. They would rightly get credit. Now, it's like; because none of the rich people are doing any useful work, they can only maintain credibility by obfuscating the source of the products we buy. They do nothing but control stuff. Controlling stuff does not add value. Once a process is organized, additional control only serves to destroy value through rent extraction.

theturtletalks2• 4 months ago

5 years ago, I set out to build an open-source, interoperable marketplace powered by open-source SaaS. It felt like a pipe dream, but AI has made the dream into fruition. People are underestimating how much AI is a threat to rent seeking middlemen in every industry.

try-working• 4 months ago

You never get rid of the middleman. You become them.

theturtletalks2• 4 months ago

If that middleman is open-source and simply interops with SaaS that itself is open-source, there simply is no moat to exploit.

throwaw12• 4 months ago

SaaS scaled by exploiting a licensing loophole that let vendors avoid sharing their modifications.

AI is going to exploit even more: "Given the repository -> Construct tech spec -> Build project based on tech spec"

At this stage, I want everyone just close their source, stop working on open source until this issue of licensing gets resolved.

Any improvement you make to the open source code will be leveraged in ways you didn't intend it to be used, eventually making you redundant in the process

dannersy• 4 months ago

Even worse, the AI will supply a mediocre version of the source specific to someone else's case, and not getting anything in return, ultimately choking the open source effort. The article touches on this briefly.

All I post anymore is anti-AI sentiment because it just feels like we're in a cycle of blind trust. A lot of FOSS seems cautious about LLMs for a plethora of reasons (quality and ethics among those) but we're a long way from making the tools that are supposedly going to replace us a locally runnable tool. So, until then, we're conceding pur agency to Anthropic and whoever else.

Meanwhile, war is breaking out and disrupting already stressed supply chains and manufacturing (for instance, Taiwan relies heavily on natural gas). Many manufacturers are starting to ditch production of consumer hardware, the supposed hardware folks ITT want to run their local models on. The vast majority of datacenters aren't being built yet, and those that are being built are missing their targets, still have aging GPUs in boxes without the infrastructure to power and turn them on, all while floating hundreds of billions in debt.

Surely I can't be the only one who sees the issues here? Each topic is hours of "what ifs" and a massive gamble to see if any of it will come together in a way that will be good for anyone who visits HN.

we4a• 4 months ago

First of all, free software still matters. Then, being a slave to a $200 subscription to a oligarch application that launders other people's copyright is not what Stallman envisioned.

The AI propaganda articles are getting more devious my the minute. It's not just propaganda---it's Bernays-level manipulation!

nunez• 4 months ago

Gaslighting as a Service

zephen2• 4 months ago

The article makes zero sense to me.

It compares and contrasts open source and free software, and then gives an example of how free software is better than closed software.

But if the premise of the article, that the agent will take the package you pick and adapt it to your needs, is correct, then honestly the agent won't give a rat's ass whether the starting point was free source or open source.

agentultra• 4 months ago

I think it will wall people off from software.

I don’t know what SaaS has to do with FOSS. The point of FOSS was to allow me to modify the software I run on my system. If the device drivers for some hardware I depend on are no longer supported by the company I bought it from, if it’s open source, I can modify and extend the software myself.

The Copy Left licenses ensure that I share my modifications back if I distribute them. It’s a thing for the public good.

Agent-based software development walls people off from that. Mostly by ensuring that the provenance of the code it generates is not known and by deskilling people so that they don’t know what to prompt or how to fix their code.

est312• 4 months ago

If I look around in the FLOSS communities, I see a lot of skepticism towards LLMs. The main concerns are:

1. they were trained on FLOSS repositories without consent of the authors, including GPL and AGPL repos

2. the best models are proprietary

3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc).

I agree those are legitimate problems but LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away. Much more powerful lobbies than the OSS ones are losing fights against the LLM companies (the big copyright holders in media).

But while companies can use LLMs to build replacements for GPL licensed code (where those LLMs have that GPL code probably in their training set), the reverse thing can also be done: one can break monopolies open using LLMs, and build so much open source software using LLMs.

In the end, the GPL is only a means to an end.

giancarlostoro2• 4 months ago

3. folks making low-effort contribution attempts using AI (PRs, security reports, etc).

Meanwhile as people sleep on LLMs to help them audit their code for security holes, or even any security code auditing tools. Script kiddies don't care that you think AI isn't ready, they'll use AI models to scrape your website for security gaps. They'll use LLMs to figure out how to hack your employees and steal your data. We already saw that hackers broke into government servers for the Mexican government, basically scraping every document of every Mexican citizen. Now is the time to start investing in security auditing, before you become the next news headline.

AI isn't the future, it's already here, and hackers will use it against you.

59nadir• 4 months ago

This reads like a "You wouldn't download a car!" ad but it's trying to scare you into using AI instead.

wolvesechoes5• 4 months ago

one can break monopolies open using LLMs

Let me know when you succeed.

the GPL is only a means to an end

And how this end is closer with LLMs?

est312• 4 months ago

And how this end is closer with LLMs?

The blog post of this thread argues that now, even average users have the ability to modify GPL'd code thanks to LLMs. The bigger advantage though is that one can use it to break open software monopolies in the first place.

A lot of such monopolies are based on proprietary formats.

If LLM swarms can build a browser (not from scratch) and C compiler (from scratch), they can also build an LLVM backend for a bespoke architecture that only has a proprietary C compiler for it. They can also build adobe software replacements, pdf editors, debug/fix linux driver issues, etc.

rzmmm• 4 months ago

LMMs can be used for example faster reverse engineering, to turn proprietary content into free.

piker• 4 months ago

LLMs are the new reality, they are not going to go away

That's the conventional wisdom, but it isn't a given. A lot of financial wizardry is taking place to prop up the best of these things, and even their most ardent proponents are starting to recognize their futility once a certain complexity level is reached. The open weight models are the stalking horse that gives this proposition the most legs, but it's not given that Anthropic and OpenAI exist as anything more than shells of their current selves in 5 years.

vetler• 4 months ago

But LLMs themselves are literally not going away, I think that's the point. Once a model is trained and let out into the open for free download, it's there, and can be used by anyone - and it's only going to get cheaper and easier.

elif• 4 months ago

agree completely. When the megacorps are building hundreds of datacenters and openly talking about plans to charge for software "like a utility," there has never been a clearer mandate for the need for FOSS, and IMO there has never been as much momentum behind it either.

these are exciting times, that are coming despite any pessimism rooted in our out-dated software paradigms.

phendrenad26• 4 months ago

The debate in the comment section here really boils down to: upstream freedom vs downstream freedom.

Copyleft licenses like GPL/Apache mandate upstream freedom: Upstream has the "freedom" to use anything downstream, including anything written by a corporation.

Non-copyleft FOSS licenses like MIT/BSD are about downstream freedom, which is more of a philosophically utilitarian view, where anyone who receives the software is free to use it however they want, including not giving their changes back to the community, on the assumption that this maximizes the utility of this free software in the world.

If you prioritize the former goal, then coding agents are a huge problem for you. If the latter, then coding agents are the best thing ever, because they give everyone access to an effectively unlimited amount of cheap code.

tmtvl• 4 months ago

What you call 'downstream freedom' isn't very downstream. The real downstream is the end user, who should have the right to know what the software is doing on their computer, to recompile the software so it works on their machine with the software that is already on it, to make changes to the software so it can serve their needs.

phendrenad26• 4 months ago

Right, well, I'm using the word "downstream" for lack of a more precise term. I'm NOT using the "normal" open-source definition of "downstream". Does that help clarify what I mean?

jaynate2• 4 months ago

“Their relationship with the software is one of pure dependency, and when the software doesn’t do what they need, they just… live with it”

Or, more likely, they churn off the product.

The SaaS platforms that will survive are busy RIGHT NOW revamping their APIs, implementing oauth, and generally reorganizing their products to be discovered and manipulated by agents. Failing in this effort will ultimately result in the demise of any given platform. This goes for larger SaaS companies, too, it’ll just take longer.

jaynate2• 4 months ago

And I think it’s less about letting agents modify the product source. That’s more of a platform capability which should also be a requirement for certain types of use cases. All comes back to listening to and / or innovating for customers.

lowsong• 4 months ago

I worry people are lacking context about how SaaS products are purchased if they think LLMs and "vibe coding" are going to replace them. It's almost never the feature set. Often it's capex vs opex budgeting (i.e., it's easier to get approval for a monthly cost than a upfront capital cost) but the biggest one is liability.

Companies buy these contracts for support and to have a throat to choke if things go wrong. It doesn't matter how much you pay your AI vendor, if you use their product to "vibe code" a SaaS replacement and it fails in some way and you lose a bunch of money/time/customers/reputation/whatever, then that's on you.

This is as much a political consideration as a financial one. If you're a C-suite and you let your staff make something (LLM generated or not) and it gets compromised then you're the one who signed off on the risky project and it's your ass on the line. If you buy a big established SaaS, do your compliance due-diligence (SOC2, ISO27001, etc.), and they get compromised then you were just following best practice. Coding agents don't change this.

The truth is that the people making the choice about what to buy or build are usually not the people using the end result. If someone down the food chain had to spend a bunch of time with "brittle hacks" to make their workflow work, they're not going to care at all. All they want is the minimum possible to meet whatever the requirement is, that isn't going to come back to bite them later.

SaaS isn't about software, it's about shifting blame.

zar1048576• 4 months ago

I wonder if there will be a different phenomena — namely everyone just developing their own personal version of what they want rather than relying on what someone else built. Nowadays, if the core functionality is straightforward enough, I find that I just end up building it myself so I can tailor it to my exact needs. It takes less time than trying to understand and adapt someone else’s code base, especially if it’s (mostly) AI generated and contains a great deal of code slop.

Mengkudulangsat• 4 months ago

This has been my experience as a newbie.

My prompts to Claude has evolved from "what program / data source do I need to do this" to "what program / data source do I need, to make you do this for me".

After a few iterations, any data source without a free API feed, or any program without a free CLI interface are edited out of the gene pool, so to speak.

jongjong2• 4 months ago

What I'm hoping for is for more competition in the tech sector. I'm tired of companies foisting Microsoft or Oracle products on everyone! WTF! The current tech sector feels like all companies are subsidiaries of Big Tech... It's likely a direct result of passive investing... Everyone who has any money and controls a small or medium sized company likely owns stock of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Google, Amazon... So they mandate their companies to use products from those big tech companies. So all the small-fish founders feel like they are dogfooding their own investments... And that's preventing new entrants from getting a foothold in B2B space... Feels like all the small companies are working for Big Tech.

Conflict of interests is the norm. It should be illegal for a company founder or director to own stock of a supplier. It should be illegal for shareholders to own stocks of two competing companies. Index funds should be illegal.

Grokify5• 4 months ago

Open source has never been more alive for me. I have been publishing low key for years, and AI has expanded that capability more than 100 fold, in all directions. I had previously published packages in multiple languages but recently started to cut back to just one manually. But now with AI, I started to expand languages again. Instead of feeling constrained by toolchains I feel comfortable with, I feel freedom to publish more and more.

The benefits to publishing AI generated code as open source are immense including code hosting and CI/CD pipelines for build, test, lint, security scans, etc. In additional to CI/CD pipelines, my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc. All of this makes the code more reliable and maintainable, for both human and AI authored code.

Some thoughts on two recent posts:

1. 90% of Claude-linked output going to GitHub repos w <2 stars (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47521157): I'm generally too busy to publishing code to promote, but at some time it might settle down. Additionally, with how fast AI can generate and refactor code, it can take some time before the code is stable enough to promote.

2. So where are all the AI apps? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47503006): They are in GitHub with <2 stars! They are there but without promotion it takes a while to get started in popularity. That being said, I'm starting to get some PRs.

As12872• 4 months ago

So we'll have 100 2-star repositories per software developer containing stolen code and that is somehow a good thing?

It is completely delusional that these copied "works" will have any effect or be used by anyone but the most rabid AI proponents just to make a point.

Grokify5• 4 months ago

If there's any stolen code generated by AI, it's certainly not intentional and a DMCA notice would be appreciated. It would be interesting to see how prevalent this is in AI generated code - is anyone doing a study?

Stars will likely go up over time, but more than the stars it's the testing and maintenance over time that's valuable. There's little promotion right now, but there are already some stars, PRs, and issues. In fact, I'm working on merging PRs now.

roncesvalles2• 4 months ago

my repos have commits authored by Claude, Dependabot, GitHub Advanced Security Bot, Copilot, etc.

Unless you're using an enterprise license that indemnifies your liabilities, you're almost certainly breaking copyright law and your packages are unusable by any serious company as a dependency. Even permissive OSS licenses like MIT don't take effect since they're predicated on the author actually holding a valid copyright (which you don't if AI agents have committed to your repo, as affirmed by USCO).

We'll almost certainly have a situation where if an open-source repo has direct AI agent commits in its history, it will be just as untouchable for companies as GPL repos.

Grokify5• 4 months ago

Given that Claude is attributed to 19M+ commits on GitHub, it will be interesting to see where this ends up. Specifically on copyright, it will be interesting to see if any DMCA takedown notices are filed, including popular projects such as OpenClaw, GSD, Gas Town, Vibium, and others.

Coding agents could make free software matter again

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