Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let's see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelligence. There is only human intelligence involved here. I will leave it up to you to judge the quality of it,…

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A human-written opinion piece arguing that AI will not kill open source software. The author contends that open source libraries provide verified, stable building blocks that AI should leverage rather than replace. The piece suggests AI could actually benefit from well-defined specifications and test suites — pointing to Jakarta EE as an example — and hints at a follow-up series exploring this relationship further.

Will AI Kill Open Source?

If AI kills open source then not because open source programs can be easily generated, but rather because open source projects are spammed with slop bug reports and pull requests.
Either way if we arive at a place where ai will replace open source, then we will have far bigger problems than that.

For open source, it’s becoming more difficult to keep the codebase clean.
The AI tries to solve the problem in the simplest possible way. This is to use already written open-source tools.

“Kill” is a strong word. I firmly believe that if AI usage remains at the level it is right now or increases, software will be more and more commoditized. And I’m not known for ambitious predictions. I never liked pulling in dependencies but it was always the pragmatic thing to do. Now when I create a project with AI, I go zero dependency first and see how far it can go. And this also affects SaaS. Why should I pay for Jira, go through all the troubles adapting myself to it or it to myself when I can create something that fulfills my needs exactly?
None of this is absolute.