Comment by ddtaylor

This combined with many other comments about other projects and the massively increased access to vibe coding makes me really excited to see how things change in the next half a decade. I've been involved in FOSS for so many decades now I understand and (mostly) trust the systems in place enough to not get stuck worrying about patch quality and other woes that aren't really specific to LLMs.

What I find a lot more interesting is the copyleft and copyright implications of how this works and I've been thinking about it a lot more over the last year. I think we all have and I think it's normal and natural for everyone to conclude that software is going to become highly personalized, similar to how the web experience was changed by extensions and browser customization, but on a grand new scale.

What this really means, and what this thread confirms is happening, is that companies no longer have software as a lever for lock in and many other anti-patterns. In the past it would take a team of wizards to unfuck something enough so that other people could continue to use it without being abused. Think adblockers, DRM unlockers, things that enable features vendors disabled when they released a new product, things vendors gave up on because they're cheap or lazy, etc.

What would happen in the past is the wizards would dump a few hundreds of hours into doing some magic and then get cease and desist orders to stop doing something people wanted once it became a pain for a copyright, trademark, or patent troll, etc.

What will happen now and in the future is people are using their own "bespoke" software. Granny can have her version she likes, with big fonts and maybe it matches to an experience she is more familiar with like a traditional newspaper. Hackers can have their version of something where it's all matrix code flowing down the screen. Other users will fall into different areas of the spectrum and feature axis.

Similar to the web extensions we will see an ability to share and cultivate these things, meaning the Grannies, Hackers and other users might see something they like from one another and share it, etc.

We'll see how far we get down the road until people get confused at how software can be shared instead of "stolen" from each other. It will be interesting to see how that conversation goes this time around when everyone is using software to circumvent a different layer of software. Put simply, do the people vibe coding different workarounds or UX improvements to a social media site think another user doing the same thing with the same color palette is "stealing" from them? If so then they are doing the same from the social media provider.

I'm not a copyleft absolutist. I would say I am a critic of software patents and that the patent system as a whole is not accomplishing much of anything let alone it's original goals. Most of those are moot points now. Regardless of your opinions that genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in.