By far the most popular npm package I've ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads. It's a small collection of utilities for working with Blobs in JavaScript. I wrote it because I found that PouchDB users were endlessly confused about how to work with Blobs and…

Read the Tea Leaves

With 80% of developers now using AI tools, small utility libraries like blob-util (5M+ weekly downloads) face obsolescence as LLMs can generate equivalent code on demand. This shift eliminates the educational value these libraries provided through documentation and tutorials, moving developers toward instant solutions over understanding. The future of open source lies in larger, more inventive projects and niche topics that LLMs cannot easily replicate, such as novel research tools and creative techniques that push boundaries beyond what AI training data covers.

The fate of “small” open source

This is not true, hand written utilities or with more human overwatch will still be better than AI slop!

Lol . I never stopped using hand written code

I’m of two minds on this; for web development specifically, the browser is becoming more capable. There’s not much of a need for jQuery, Underscore, etc. that provide functionality that is now part of <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Baseline/Compatibility" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Baseline standards</a>, you don’t need CSS preprocessors to get nested styles working, the browser has its own <code>left-pad</code> functions now so the reliance on some single-purpose functions is going away. However, for things the browser doesn’t provide directly one nice feature of external dependencies is being able to run <code>npm audit fix</code> every now and then; your own in-house utility functions will need to be maintained by you when you could offload some of that. If you’ve got too many external dependencies your app becomes fragile as well; say (with npm again) some package requires a new version of Node but another package requires an older version of Node, now you need to either fork and update the older package or implement your own / find an alternative. Or say a single-function package updates with breaking changes or decides to change how things work in a way that doesn’t work for you but doesn’t update their version numbers semantically and now you’ve got breaking changes after routine updates.
Overall a balance needs to be struck between rolling your own functions and using external dependencies and it’s not always clear which is the best path forward so you might as well use your best judgement and adapt as things change.