Post #4116101

2026-07-25 14:37 UTC

Until recently, this would have required being a solid coder. Not anymore. I deeply believe that LLMs will empower people, like nothing before, to _own_ the technology they depend on. I wish the open-source community would realise that. LLM might disrupt today's open-source workflows, and force a deep transformation. But LLMs might also become an extremely powerful vector to support and expand the _idea_ of libre software. Let invent the processes, practices, tools to make that happen! 9/9

Replies (1)

@mc@social.sciences.re 2026-07-25 20:30

@severin@hci.social I'll disagree on at least three points here : - Thinking that LLM allow to build "excellent" open-source tools only look at the code production part, not at the maintenance. If an LLM produces code that no one understand and no one can maintain in the long term, it's not an "excellent" open source tool, just a time bomb. The best free software project are never just the code, but about the community, the interactions, the design process and how we collectively improve that common (in Ostrom's sense). - I also want to live in a world where people own their tech stack and do not depend on the whims of a few capitalistic actors, such as all the actors with the power to (re)train LLMs (anyone with enough money to build a datacenter and influence to bypass/ignore whatever IP law that may exist anywhere). Normalizing that code production can depend on those actors is already capitulating, and depending on those tools for producing *anything* is the contrary of empowering, it's saying that learning is useless. - "Being a solid coder" is a craft and asking the (mostly volunteer) maintainers, who master that craft, to accept whatever output anyone who is feeling empowered by today's trillionaires thinks is an improvement to their software is asking too much of them. I can mentor someone who wants to learn, but I cannot mentor anyone who already thinks that learning is useless.

Open ##4116099