AI Reshapes Open Source: Building Got Easier, Standing Out Got Harder

Generative AI has permanently changed how software is built, and the open source community is feeling both the benefits and the costs. According to developer Petre Popescu, AI is a tool that has done a lot of great work in the software industry, but also a lot of damage.

Building Became the Easy Part

Popescu, a software engineer and long-time open source advocate, describes how AI allowed him to bridge knowledge gaps and release DrakoFlow, a modern text-to-diagram engine, despite limited front-end experience. Building software, at least for small and niche applications, is now easy. AI has enabled developers to fill skill gaps and even allowed non-developers to create projects. The result is a market flooded with applications of all sizes, posted daily on platforms like Reddit, HackerNews, LinkedIn, and the app stores.

Marketing Became the Moat

With almost anyone able to build an application, software itself is no longer a competitive advantage. Marketing has taken that role. Popescu notes that while the number of apps has exploded in the past two years, revenue from these apps has barely increased. Useful projects get lost in what he calls a sea of vibe-coded software, and most developers lack the skills, time, or resources to market their work. Open source maintainers face a further dilemma: keep software truly free, or gatekeep features behind a paid version to cover costs and compete with established, well-funded alternatives like PlantUML or Mermaid.

Fragmentation Instead of Contribution

AI has also changed how people approach existing problems. Because building from scratch is now easy, developers increasingly create new projects even when free, open source alternatives already exist. Popescu admits he built his own Git client simply because he could, rather than adopting an existing one. The consequence is many solutions for the same problem, but none mature enough to become widely used, since effort is spread across countless new starts instead of helping one project grow.

Open Source Is Not Dead

Despite these pressures, Popescu concludes that open source is not dead. AI transformed the community, and both projects and developers needed to evolve. In the forest of new applications, he argues, there will always be a sapling that grows into a mighty oak and shadows the rest.

Sources: Hackernoon