"friends" is not limited to people that you grew up with, or studied with, or people that your parents knew. They can also be contacts that you made by reaching out, in social circles or through shared interests or tecnhical workshops, etc.
> Otherwise you are no better than someone at an intersection with a bottle of Windex and a squeegee who, unsolicited, cleans a windshield and then demands the driver to pay for it.
I am struggling to see how this analogy is relevant. It seems more like a knee jerk to the use of "force" in the headline. TFA seems to be talking about a potential way to _generate revenue_ through side channels that are deemed valuable by the users. This is clearly different from "demand the user to pay for it" as the analogy would imply.
Open source contributors don't come unsolicited to "clean the users' windshields". They just write stuff that they find useful and the inherent value of that work attracts other developers as much as users. And then the whole thing grows too large to maintain without serious money.
If the language were centered around donations (charitable gifts) instead of revenue and the implicit expectations that go with it, then I might take a different view.
> It's asking somebody who writes code to now read and debug others code.
That's exactly right. Open source projects are currently drowning under LLM generated PRs, where those who used to write code are simply punting that work to AI, but still expecting others to review it. It's not okay to expect such a free lunch. If you moved the labour of writing code one step away, then you are yourself the first line of defence now, so you better start reviewing code that you claim to be yours.
That's what I do and expect my colleagues to do. Even before LLMs I was reviewing my own PRs before submitting them to others. I still do that. I work closely with Claude to create something good that I'm happy with, then I review it and test it to ensure it's good. And only then do I submit the PR to colleagues for final review.
I expect the same from colleagues, I'm not interested in treating them as a middle man between me and Claude.
