The future of open source
Open source isn’t dying, but the “open” part is being redefined. We’re moving away from the era of radical transparency, of “anyone can contribute,” and heading toward an era of radical curation. The future of open source, in short, may belong to the few, not the many. Yes, open source’s “community” was always a bit of a lie, but AI has finally made the lie unsustainable. We’re returning to a world where the only people who matter are the ones who actually write the code, not the ones who prompt a machine to do it for them. The era of the drive-by contributor is being replaced by an era of the verified human.
In this new world, the most successful open source projects will be the ones that are the most difficult to contribute to. They will demand a high level of human effort, human context, and human relationship. They will reject the slop loops and the agentic psychosis in favor of slow, deliberate, and deeply personal development. The bazaar was a fun idea while it lasted, but it couldn’t survive the arrival of the robots. The future of open source is smaller, quieter, and much more exclusive. That might be the only way it survives.
In sum, we don’t need more code; we need more care. Care for the humans who shepherd the communities and create code that will endure beyond a simple prompt.
