The reality is that no one was gatekeeping you or anyone else from doing whatever you wanted with free software. The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you. The premise here is that you can accomplish what you couldn’t before without actually understanding the concepts or putting in the same effort. _There is undeniably utility in that_, but I don’t see any strong argument for why it is beneficial to free software in general. It's not even clear whether it has been a net positive or negative so far, though it is undeniably a win for the corpos.
Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.
I thought it was an analogy to people handwaving "free software" without truly understanding that people sacrifice their entire lives to make it work and that's still insufficient.
The reality is same for your angle: nothing is gatekeeping or stopping anyone from developing the craft the old way, and keeping 'thinking' so strong. Perhaps there are other ways to strengthen thinking, though?
The sole issue here is compensation. The answer is an uncomfortable one, or one with a lot more regulation that can't be enforced on a global level.
Oversimplifying to see if there's anything worth examining...but imagine:
subscriptions to organizations whose sole purpose is to train AI. They're compensated as the AI service is consumed by the public. The public pays a tax to finance AI growth, and the tax is divided to the organizations, to pay out to members. Members are incentivized to 'keep the craft alive' and train incoming members.
Since that is a huge change and I'm talking out of my ass, I'll point out something more realistic: we'll probably just write up some more red tape and hope for the best on the global stage.
Free software has two cases for free: free as in 'free drink', and free as in 'free to change'.
The first use of free is definitely improved by AI, it's the second use of free that bothers the author. There's too much AI slop and PRs, and it's impossible for the author to identify 'good PRs' from bad ones. There's too much volume of change to sift through, and so the ability to change software is stifled.
What can you do then? Either close the repo to the public, or limit who can send you feedback: as it is now, there's too much volume for reviewers to keep. It's too difficult to validate 'AI Slop' from quality code written by someone who 'has put in the time' and done their due diligence. Someone who has done this wastes less time for the reviewer, and probably improves the quality of the 'free beer' product.
Are you suggesting, AI hasn't improved the first case of free, 'free drink'? It's certainly an issue for the second case, 'free to change', but it seems like there are things that can be done to help with those problems: but it adds more churn and probably requires more time (unless I'm misunderstanding things here: which is very possible).
New layer of abstraction. Someone needs to understand how to build that old C library and reprogram that embedded controller, but it doesn't need to be me. Give someone infinite possibilities. Tell them they can have any software change they want. Everyone will have some good ideas. Some people will be head and shoulders above the rest. Being able to do anything (not that LLMs exactly deliver on that goal) doesn't mean you'll do something interesting. It doesn't mean you'll invent a product worth paying for, or impress many people, or make anyone particularly happy or inspired.
> The barriers were knowledge, understanding, expertise, and hard work, none of which AI fixes for you.
The biggest barrier was time, there are only 24 hours in the day and no amount of hard work or knowledge is going to change that. There are just some fundamental limits of what you can accomplish as a single person in that time. And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.
AI just fundamentally turns that around and gives you a whole bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems you do not want to waste your time on and they let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you.
I am going to agree, albeit from an entirely different perspective.
My job has nothing to do with programming. Aside from administrative tasks, my job has nothing to do with computers. Yet I know how to program and I realize that automating those administrative tasks will have huge benefits for me. The problem is my employer doesn't pay me to write code, so I never got around to that automation.
Realistically speaking, writing that code without AI would not offer much in the way of understanding or expertise. Most of it is: "look up X, if A then B, else C, iterate" type tasks. There is a barrier in knowledge with respect to library calls, but that's pretty close to junk knowledge (it's rapidly obsoleted, and useless if I need to interface with different software).
So the choice is between doing without, or spending a lot of time picking up tasks that are of no value to me. Time was the barrier.
These arguments also remind me a lot of the microcomputer revolution: a heck of a lot of mainframe COBOL and FORTRAN developers were critical of underpowered computers and toy programming languages. The reality is that it opened up opportunities for a new generation of developers, and new types of software was created because the problem solvers were closer to the problem.
AI does not fundamentally turn that around, with "that" being as you say the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day and that a single person could only accomplish so much.
Your mistake is one I see everywhere these days, and that is the belief that a given problem with which YOU do not want to waste your time, are actually problems which are not worth doing by anyone. When examined I think this idea is obviously wrong, and misanthropic at heart. People prioritizing different things are still valuable.
The reason free software has progressed up until AI has been a combination of economic conditions and unrivalled passion on the part of the developers. The SQLite project has taken 20 years to optimize, and the creator still says there is work to be done.
Contrast that career spanning work with a pattern AI encourages of builders: offload the difficult or boring parts, get something barely functional, move on to the next thing. Building like this leaves you with no more experience than you already had to begin with.
As another commenter said, there is undeniable and very exciting utility in that being an option! The class of "easy pickings" in projects has widened tremendously in size. I agree with you when you say that it has the power to let you focus on the stuff that actually matters to you. Software configurability is going to be a major priority!
However, and I think you'd agree since we both feel free software was and is inherently complicated, configurability of software is only useful with the knowledge of how to put it to best use, like any other tool. If we were to give a laptop with Claude to a technical layperson, would they not immediately attempt to build without taking the time to understand (for example) what a database is? And when encountering problems beyond their understanding and only expecting the AI "to fix it", would they not be turned away from the tool entirely?
These problems may not matter to one who DOES understand the nature of software, but they do matter overall.
The biggest barrier for people with knowledge, understanding, expertise, and the willingness to work hard was certainly time. But there were a lot of people with plenty of time that never got anything done.
In the beforetimes there were a lot of would-be founders running around looking for people who actually knew things and could do things (that is, technical cofounders). Will some of those people use Claude Code to make successful products on their own? A few, I'm sure. But I expect a lot of them will stay ignorant fools who have prompted their way to a pile of garbage.
I can be confident of that because there were plenty of founders with FFF money who could suddenly hire "capable coworkers" that produced garbage. "AI" is certainly removing barriers. But as I deal with a big increase in polished but idiotic email and PRs, I have to think that barriers were helpful both to the world at large (by keeping fools at bay) and to the promising but incompetent (by giving them a chance to build character and wisdom).
Only if you have all the rest sorted, and that’s a big if. It’s also circular. You need time to achieve most of it.
> And good luck trying to find contributors who want to work for free, when they already are busy with their own projects.
Nothing against that. As I mentioned, there’s utility there. I don’t think it’s bad to put these tools to use. But this idea of having “a bunch of extremely capable co-workers that you can let deal with all the problems” without understanding what they do or reviewing their output (due to whatever reason), in other words putting the effort and understanding the output, is exactly what I was talking about.
Relieving yourself of thinking and effort, whether through a machine or another human, is not the liberating force you think it is, especially when that effort isn't just grunt work, but the very process that helps you develop and grow.