I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.
This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.
I am convinced that it’s happening, but I’ve had it happen before when I spent a couple of years in roles where I didn’t directly write code. It took my about two weeks to get back to where I was, and I see no reason to expect it will be any different these days.
Further, I don’t expect I’ll ever need to refresh those skills. The next time I pick them up will likely be simply because I wanted to write something myself on my off-time.
The implicit arrangement in corporate use and contribution to open source is that everyone benefits. People contribute work and testing that improves libraries and tools that everyone else can use, making all our projects better. This includes corporations, many of which also engage in this mutual benefit by hiring actual developers to back open source projects. I think it’s a brilliant system, huge fan.
Enter LLMs training off that data. It looks similar on the surface, but if you think about the balance of cost and benefit it becomes clear it is no longer balanced. The training algorithms and models are closed source, and come at a hefty usage cost. AI companies saved hundreds of billions of dollars of paying humans to help train their algorithms by taking advantage of an open system that was open on with another kind of balance in mind.
So in short the work was offered for free within a specific kind of relationship. Now a powerful outsider is steamrolling and taking advantage of that existing open dynamic.
Most FOSS is offered free of charge, but not free of conditions. You still have legal requirements spelled out in the licenses, from attribution to actually requiring you to license your work accordingly.
I feel like the standard "Free as in Gratis vs. Free as in Freedom" argument doesn't quite explain the issue people have here.
Open-source code still had terms, and AI training was an unfortunate blind spot in those terms. If a human being learned how to code 100% from open-source code, nobody saw a problem if that person went on to write closed-source code.
But it feels fundamentally different when the open-source code is just being fed into a machine that uses absurd amounts of processing until closed-source code comes out the other side. It feels like theft.
And that means nobody can make money off of their derivative work? If I open source my work, that means it is open source (by definition). It is a gift[1] - to everyone. If someone uses it to create value, good for them!
I have done a few open-source projects (none of those took off, but that’s OK). I did them because I wanted to give to the people, not greedy corporations. It was an implicit contract with the world, which has been broken by AI. You can say “but it was never written!” Maybe. It still hurts. (And it is also not really true: for example MIT requires attribution, which I’m still waiting to see in all of the AI-generated/AI-helped projects…)
It was also a joy to write things and know certain like-minded people would like it.
Now I don’t really want to do that anymore.
And corporations are made up of people. People who decide to organize to form a legal entity so that they can operate as a business. Some people may choose to run it as a solo proprietorship - others want to raise money and form groups so they can do bigger things. They are still people.
I feel amazing that code that I wrote contributed to development of this amazing technology. "Greedy corporations"? I can download Qwen 3.8 27B today for free and run it myself and not pay for anything but electricity. I get the same performance that I would have had to pay $20-$100/mo. ~6 months ago (which frankly, was pretty cheap for what it got me).
The "greedy corporations" btw, also spent billions and did a lot more than just dump the code into a gradient descent algo (RLVR and more) to get the models to the place they are at today. Simply dumping GitHub into a transformer neural net would not give you a coding model even close to what exists today - open or proprietary. For $20/mo., I can now explore subjects that I wouldn't have even considered looking at before. For me, personally, that is a good tradeoff.
The 10 year old inside me is so incredibly excited. My actual 10 year old self was obsessed with tombs and ancient Egypt. I remember a whole summer I couldn't stop thinking about and talking about the "Sphinx on the face of Mars". Thankfully these days I have friends, but I have been rewatching all of Stargate so this is very timely.
I've also been watching Stargate (on season 2), it's fun getting to know the Vancouver area as Jack and friends explore the galaxy but always end up in the PNW ;)
Yeah very cool filming locations. Also the university they filmed the Tollana planet is where they filmed certain scenes from the new Battlestar Galactica.
Well it was fun as a child to speculate. Definitely don’t think there are ruins from ancient Egyptians on Mars now LOL. But the possibility of signs of microbial life is fascinating from an evolutionary biology perspective.
You don’t understand fondly reminiscing about when the world seemed more magical? It has nothing to do with the truth of it, it has everything to do with how it felt.
This reminds me of when I coach a kid in chess and the first thing I ask them is what they want to achieve. A fairly common response is to not lose. At first that doesn't sound unreasonable, yet the goal there doesn't require any coaching at all - simply only play terrible players!
So too with knowledge. The path to never believing anything false would be to simply minimize the amount you learn, and certainly to avoid learning anything developed within the past century or so. It's not a great perspective for self betterment. Learning from one's mistakes is the path to improvement in most of every domain. Mistakes and falsehoods are nothing to regret. If anything, they're something to rejoice over. It's only the fool that believes all he thinks must be true.
Hmm. I tend to have the opposite. With science usually the process of overwriting a credence means increasing understanding and getting a deeper perspective. No one is born knowing anything, and as we advance it’s inevitable to learn certain prior beliefs were wrong. Might as well make it a fun thing.
Bad code as an invasive species is the freshest take I've heard. I have a hard enough time arguing with people that tech debt isn't about bad code, but shifting priorities and requirements. This is going to be a really useful analogy for me going forward, thanks!
FWIW, I've seen the flip-side as well; solid coding patterns are easy for a person (or an LLM) to copy. To abuse the analogy a bit, your gardeners are happy copying whatever happens to be there, bad code will dominate that process unless actively removed, and the exponential nature of that arrangement favours removing trash code (weeds) early, much earlier than you might otherwise think.
Feels like 2026 is the best time for non-US tech companies to grow. What a weird timeline we're in. Excited for our developments up here in Canada too :D
This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.
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