Programming

I hope this is a good question:

What happens in a couple years when all this code that's been written by Copilot and the like, Microsoft then turns around and says, "OH YEAH, BTW THAT WAS GENERATED BY OUR AI SO NOW WE OWN YOUR APP!" Look, most social media ToS says anything uploaded to their sites is owned by them now, royalties-free.

Right now it's no big deal to any AI company because more code means more training for the AI, but will we get to the point that they're happy with code output enough and then turn around claiming they own those? Plus, any successful apps are then basically free/no cost contributed projects?

Bonus: Also, what happens when AI is trained on AI-written code that was initially wrong by AI? Is the system doomed to never really improve because of so many inaccuracies?

LLMs have made it so that it takes longer to determine whether content is bad than it takes to make bad content. The solution SHOULD be to demand that people examine the content themselves and turn it into high-quality content, but that's not going to happen so long as it is possible for anyone to submit pull requests. The only solution that will actually work is to restrict who is allowed to submit content to your projects.

I wonder how many of these folks just don't know about the alternatives. I've come across otherwise capable developers who think git and GitHub are the same thing. People come to software from all sorts of backgrounds so I can't blame anyone for not knowing.

I also imagine that if people are aware, the activation energy of switching is too high. It's more than just setting a new remote and pushing. You have to learn the new system, maybe migrate tickets, wrestle with CI, etc. For a hobby project it's probably easier to shut it down and just go do something else. I also don't blame them here. There's more to life than open source, and its amazing people are able to contribute when they can.

How do you know those projects are shutting down and not moving?

I think the open source requirement is holding them back, people also want to start projects without immediately making them open source. Maybe they don't know it yet.

These people, if they want to avoid github, will host their own private gitlab instance, or use just a local git repo, or another private repo, until they decide to make it public.

I think this makes a big contribution the disparity.

To add, I think it's fine, as long as anyone can clone the github. It's not like I have any solution to this.

There's a lesson to be learned about making tools that need to be used with subtlety and making them more approachable than a fisher price hammer, and then getting shocked that people use them inappropriately.

I'm sure *this time* humanity will learn it's lesson.

Even projects on other repo systems have shut down. Too many AI submissions for them. LLMs are integrated so deeply into certain IDEs that some developers I've seen literally did not know they were using them (no, they couldn't tell me why they thought writing a prompt in the IDE wasn't hitting an LLM).

It's a systemic issue that GitHub exacerbates but it's by no means limited to it.

In a nutshell, the network effect. At an individual level, if someone wants to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. But unless they're a repo owner or a BDFL, the project(s) they were working on would still be on GitHub. And that means they can't access the GitHub PR process for development, or open tickets for new issues, or any other number of interactions, except for maybe pulling code from the repo.

On the flip side, at a project level, if the project owners agree that it's time to leave GitHub, they absolutely can. And while they could convince the primary developers to also leave with them, the occasional contributors might still be left behind on GitHub. Moving away from GitHub could potentially cut the number of contributors down by a lot. And what's guaranteed is that the project will have to retool for the new space they move to. And if it's self-hosted, that's even more work to do, all of which is kinda a distraction from whatever the project was meant to do.

The network effect is the result of the sum being more useful than its parts. When the telephone was invented, a single telephone on its own is entirely useless, because nobody else has one to use. But with ten telephone, one person has the potential to call any of 9 other people. With 10,000 telephones, that's over 9000 people they could call, or those people calling them. At a million phones, the telephone is well entrenched into common usage. Even when more and more people despise making phone calls, the telephone is still around, having changed forms since the 1980s into the modern smartphone.

Why? Because networks are also stable: if a few thousand people give up their smartphones per year, the utility of the telephone is not substantially changed for the grand majority of telephone users. The threshold to break the network effect varies, but I hazard a guess that if 1/3 of telephone users gave up their numbers, then the telephone's demise would be underway. Especially in the face of modern replacements.

I would regard GitHub as having a network effect, in the same way that Twitter should have collapsed but hasn't. Too many local governments are invested into it as their sole social media presence, and in doing so, also force their citizens to also subscribe to Twitter. GitHub is not a monopoly in the sense that anti-trust laws would apply. But they are a monopoly in that they own the platform, and thus own the network.

But there's an upside: communities of people are also networks. Depending on how cohesive the contributors to a particular GitHub repo are, enough people can make the move away and would sway the unwilling to also move with them. This is no different than convincing family members to move to Signal, for example. Yes, it's hard. But communities look out for their common interests. And if AI slop is affecting a community, then even though they didn't want to deal with it, they have to make a choice.

Be the community member you want to see. Advocate for change in your network of people, however big or small. Without critical mass, a community will only splinter when acting unilaterally.

Laziness.

momentum can be a pain in the buttocks. the time lost working on project, chasing mistakes that come with migrating tools, getting everyone across the globe on board.

must seem like k2 when you are hanging on janky anchors to begin with ...

It's not that I doubt you, but do you have some sort of source for this? I'm interested in the metrics.