I am pretty sure I know the answer, but I am wondering what people think about this. Say you come across a new fediverse platform. It has a lot of innovative features, and seems to be well thought out overall. A lot of people have been excited by the features and have been joining to check these new features out.
The one rub, the project admits that they used AI agents in the foundational stages of the project to accelerate development progress, then once the foundation was built, they analyzed, bug fixed, and documented the code, and brought in human contributors to assist with developing the project going forward. They do still allow AI code, but only certain types and using certain quality protocols to ensure code consistency, and are clear and up front about this, and unapologetic, as it was the only way they could make this project happen in the time and manner it did.
I know AI is somewhat more accepted in the coding world these days, depending on who you talk to, but I know some people have strong stances in it. How would you feel about a project like this? Under what circumstances would you be ok with joining a platform that has used AI in its code?
I think people will find it harder and harder to find open source projects without AI coding in it.
AI (at least with recent models) can really be a time saver and a skill booster (up to a point), and open source projects are all about people giving their time away for free. You can boycott projects that use AI all you want, but will you be giving your time and do the work AI does for the project? I think that a lot of no-AI forks of existing projects will eventually die from lack of maintenance while the original AI assisted will continue to grow.
That being said, there is also a difference between a full bro-ai-vibe coded project from someone with little technical skill or knowledge (“Claude build me the next Facebook, secure, no bugs plz” ) and a more fleshed out project using AI to assist experienced developers.