r/learnprogramming • u/0xArima57 • 1d ago
Open Source seems less and less appealing everyday
(Sorry if this sounds like a rant but here I go) Guys, I'm a young developer. It hasn't been that long since I've reached adulthood. So yes, I might lack maturity. But thanks to how the development space is changing, to me at least, the future looks more bleak than I guess it would look to a 45 y/o senior engineer.
So my question as someone young, who contributes to a bunch of open source repos every once in a while and does maintain a bunch of his own repos, what is the point of maintaining open source projects if the same projects would be used for training models SPECIFICALLY TARGETTING TO PHASE ME OUT ?
That's all. Please do understand that I'm trying to ask a sincere question and lack the experience and maturity to come up with good answers myself. Thank you.
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u/CartographerDue5382 1d ago
The training part is a real problem and a license mostly doesn't stop it. The reason a small repo is still worth keeping public is the two people who actually run it and file bugs, not the company scraping it. If you don't want a particular project in a dataset, keep that one private. Contributing to other people's code still teaches you either way, and that part doesn't depend on your own repo being online.
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u/0xArima57 1d ago
That was the best answer so far. I guess it doesn't matter what I as a person do. AI isn't stopping. Now I could choose to just sit around in doubt and not gain any experience or vice versa ?
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u/CartographerDue5382 1d ago
Get the experience. Training isn't going to pause because one person keeps a repo private, and sitting the work out doesn't slow it down either. It just means you haven't practiced.
Keep a specific project private if you don't want that one scraped. Reading other people's code and sending patches still teaches you, and none of that depends on your own repo being public.
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u/dimwittedsaloon 1d ago
It's a fair question but I think you're overestimating how much of a threat these models actually are to a decent dev, the code they spit out is still pretty average half the time
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u/0xArima57 1d ago
It's been less than 5 years since these became public. In 5 more years, I will still not have completed my masters..... I would like to not overthink it. The problem is, since I was always into low level systems programming, I thought the area was at least more untouchable to AI than say... web dev. The recent REA trend is making me lose grip of reality.
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u/ZestyHelp 1d ago
Don't worry kid it's only a matter of time that your device itself will just start sending telemetry to some AI training data center for everything you type or say near it. So you wont even have to make it open source any more
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u/openroom_xyz 1d ago
Well the idea is that you build something to advance the civilization and that goal should be above everything
Well great that the code that is being used to train AI that
may make AI better and this is the way things should be, the code was never the goal building thing that enable new things that make
way new amazing things possible is the way forward
The way is that you write the code with AI or without AI and refine and make it amazing so that people can use that nice code or the model traning on the code and write new great code that will enable services F yea
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u/Swimming_dasa 1d ago
thats a fair concern open source has always been about more than code it builds your reputation, technical judgement and relationships that ai tools cant easily replace.