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Vibe Coding Is Killing Open Source Software, Researchers Argue:
According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it's happening faster than anyone predicted.
Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there's a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that's been built up over decades.
Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They're collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.
Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don't give back.
The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no.
"Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement...higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare," the study said. "In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages...the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction."
[...] According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don't give back to the OSS communities they're taking from. "The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds," he said. "I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries."
The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren't considering. "The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling," Koren told 404 Media. "The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential 'deep-pocket' user base of OSS."
This won't end well. "Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source," Koren said. "You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening."
He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can't continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. "We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data," he said. "The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS."
[...] "Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors," Koren said. "Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?"
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15494
(Score: 3, Insightful) by looorg on Monday February 09, @07:31PM
Isn't it that which is the problem? You are creating less and less what we could call "real programmers" and more and more "AI sloppers". The "AI sloppers" won't contribute hardly anything of worth and value, after all they don't really know how the machines work or how to program. They just give instructions to the AI and it slops it together for them. That probably doesn't count as a contribution. If it did someone more competent would slop it together better. Just not enough "real programmers" to go around.
The amount of people that actually learns to code is staggeringly small, and probably shrinking. As the workforce is slowly being filled with more and more sloppers instead of actual coders. After all coding was hard cause we had so little information, now there is to much information which makes it overwhelming and hard plus people just got lazy and now the machines "code" for them.
Most universities or schools hardly teach or put much time into actual real programming anymore and it's probably going to be even less of it in the future. It will be the "it" language for the moment -- for a long time that have been some version of C (C, C++ or C#) and Java. But these days it seems to be more and more Python and such things. One can just watch the TIOBE index. It's all Python, now more then twice as popular and common as C. ASM? Nope. So you kind of get out of it what you put into it. Slop in, Slop out.