I’m curious how AI coding assistants will change open source software development. If I write software with an AI coding assistant, am I more or less likely to use open source software solutions? Am I more or less inclined to make it into an open source software project than I would have before AI?
The first concern with AI coding assistants is that we’ll end up with many variations of the same code snippets, all being maintained separately. The anti-open source model.
Creating vs. Collaborating
When you use an AI tool to solve a problem, sometimes the AI recommends an existing open source library or framework, but often it just helps write code to solve the specific problem presented to it. This is a pattern I’ve already seen in open source adoption.
Developers initially just want code to solve the immediate problem
When developers first encounter open source software, they are often just looking for a quick solution to their immediate problem. They often copy and paste code directly into their software, whether they find the code on Stack Overflow or GitHub. They are looking to solve their problem, not collaborate.
For example, I was helping a very large software company more effectively manage their open source software usage. They had discovered that they had over 70 copies of the source code of a popular open source software project embedded in their source code. Over 70 times, a developer at their organization had gone looking for an existing solution to a software problem, found this open source software package, and copy and pasted the code as a starting point.
It wasn’t a licensing problem – the license permitted this use. It wasn’t necessarily a maintenance problem either – while inefficient, there was nothing technically wrong with each developer having their own copy tailored to their specific needs.
It was, however, a significant security problem. If a vulnerability was ever discovered in that code, they would have no easy way to (a) know about it or (b) deploy fixes across all instances.
Missing the Real Benefits of Open Source
What this approach meant was that they were only getting one benefit of open source: saving initial development costs. They missed out on:
- Security
- Ongoing maintenance
- Community-driven enhancements
From an open source perspective, all of those teams should have been using the upstream version and tracking their dependency on it. Any needed changes should have been submitted as pull requests and coordinated with the original maintainers.
AI as an Amplifier
AI coding tools are making this even easier. They are helping you create a solution to your problem very quickly, building on decades of best practices. Your solution will likely look like many, many other solutions that have been written. This is good – it’ll likely work!
The AI Dilemma
I’m worried that AI is amplifying this pattern across all our software. For example, if you are trying to handle HTML events, will your AI tool recommend using jQuery, or will it just help you write code that does what jQuery already does? At the moment, I think we are getting some of both.
Who will contribute to open source?
As we increasingly rely on AI coding assistants, are we creating more isolated code islands rather than building collaborative bridges? Who will contribute changes back upstream when AI generates solutions? Me or the AI?
How has your interaction with open source software projects changed since you started using AI coding assistants?