I'm an open source dev and I appreciate AI. I'm glad it exists and I have no problem with people being rewarded for their work on AI.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
Though I'm not surprised by this offering, I feel like I need some time to absorb it. It feels like the stepping stone to the next big thing.
It's going to destroy a lot of startups which were monetizing this exact idea. But clearly it's a low-hanging fruit so it makes sense that OpenAI would do it.
This is literally the recipe for the coming software apocalypse.
Just watch the software engineers who say "Let's be careful" lose their jobs and get replaced by non-technical vibe-coders churning out 10K lines of dirty insecure, unmaintainable code per day... Ticking time bomb.
I swear, good engineers are going to move to North Korea to monetize because of the amount and size of 'opportunities' this will create.
It seems so far-fetched but that's the direction it seems to be heading.
exactly how I feel. I mean let's face it, we were overpaid and underworked because we were considered magicians, but the magic is gone.
What I fear is that it's impossible for the untrained to see the difference between a highly-technical developer and the vibe-coder.
Software is so buggy nowadays (just look at Facebook, or Facebook Ads. Crazy) I wonder what's going to happen in the long run.
I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah, have you tried debugging AI-generated codes of thousands of lines where the original dev doesn't exist? It's a mess I don't wanna clean up.
>> I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah
Seems we're on the same wavelength because I had the exact same thought about this.
But actually, I'm probably not so fussy. I wouldn't mind cleaning up the mess if I'm paid hourly... But now my concern is: What if they want me to clean up the mess but demand that I do it in a particular way which makes it impossible?
I'm already seeing signs of this. This was already kind of the case in my last job; I had to fix things and implement new features but we had to keep the same clunky, over-engineered architecture. My current job doesn't have the same degree of architectural legacy baggage but there is a lot of bureaucracy to deal with instead, which is itself restrictive.
I make skills to allow AI to integrate with my platform; it's documentation with cURL commands. It can interact with every aspect of my platform via HTTP and access its full capabilities. I can tweak its token permissions as I like and revoke access if necessary.
My experience is that AI has significantly boosted the value of a quality code-base. A good codebase essentially codes itself.
There are project I've built from scratch that I would feel confident to hand off to a bunch of non-technical vibe coders and I know they would be productive and the product would likely be secure; because the existing codebase already exhibits all the patterns and principles that are required for that kind of project.
It would probably slowly degrade over time if a lot of vibe-coded logic is added on top but I think they could get very far feature-wise whilst keeping the software reliable.
But even though the value of such codebase has increased, people haven't adapted to this new reality. People are generally not good at telling what is good code. Because we don't actually have consensus on a definition. My definition is that good code is code that is easy to extend and maintain.
If implementing a feature requires a huge amount of tokens, then there's a good chance the codebase is not great.
I've worked on a codebase where a small feature requires might require 3k tokens, but on a different codebase, a feature of similar complexity would require 30k tokens minimum... And it's not about the size of the project; it's more about how the logic is divided and the architecture. And importantly; it's not a one-off; it's a clear observable, repeatable pattern.
This article seems like a reaction to DuckDB's surge in popularity. Having multiple DB engines to choose from is good and it often doesn't matter which one you use. One could make the same argument about DuckDB. Many database engines are multi-purpose. Though of course there are specific use cases where a different DB may be more appropriate...
Anyway databases nowadays are a commodity. A sticky commodity but nonetheless they are replaceable; increasingly so in the age of AI where data migrations are easier than ever.
Sandboxed execution is definitely one aspect... But IMO, this is still not secure enough for vibe coders. They will want to have data-driven apps to share among small groups of people, then the security of the sandbox doesn't matter if they expose some external endpoints and if the access control logic which guards data is flawed.
Even if each user gets their own sandbox, they will still want to configure different access rules for different kinds of data which they host.
That said the idea that each user could control and host their own data is interesting and could work. I imagine you could have apps which link data from many different user sandboxes via remote foreign keys.
You could have a centralized data schema controlled by the application owner but the data itself would be held/scattered across a large number of sandboxes.
I enjoyed reading this. It has a "butterfly effect" kind of vibe how such a random trivial-sounding pursuit can lead to something consequential. It's also mind-opening to realize how many strange human activities are happening in the background.
Reading this is especially interesting to me because it's what I've been working towards for the last 14 years or so. Though like this group, it also came together for me piece by piece.
I got interested in this specific idea back in the early days of Firebase I saw someone built a realtime HTML component with PolymerJS called 'collection' and I became consumed by the idea of fully generic realtime self-updating components. My approach is a bit different than OP or that of HTMX though; it's JSON over the wire, not HTML.
I've built a full implementation in Node.js with a set of declarative frontend components.
Yes. Vanilla JS is the best. You don't need TypeScript, Claude never makes type errors. TS just costs additional tokens and fills up the context window with useless type information; the wasted space could have been used to provide additional code/logical context.
That said, I also think everyone who contributed content online deserves to be rewarded for their contribution, especially since OpenAI (which made the largest contribution) was a non-profit in the beginning. So there should be some kind of tax. Otherwise I agree, it's not ethical. It's not 'fair use' of copyrights.
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