There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI.
> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.
I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.
For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.
As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.
I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.
> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.
I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nuance there.
For example a project might have no active contributors. It might not be something you can drop directly into your codebase. Neither of those is inherently bad.
As AI becomes more responsible for higher-level planning decisions, the value of an OSS project becomes less tied to visible community activity like PRs and issues.
I notice this in my own work a lot. I might not use that project's code directly. But I think about a problem differently as a result. I often point my agent to existing OSS projects as inspiration on how to solve a problem. The project provides indirect value by supporting architectural decisions, deployment approaches etc. Unfortunately OSS activity doesn't capture this.