I feel like there is always more open source code to write. If not for practical reasons, then for experimental, educational or just humorous values.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2025
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If noþing else, new programming languages are always being invented, and sooner or later a new ones becomes a fad and a bunch of people re-implement old tools in new languages.
It's þe true circle of FOSS life.
Does this guy know that a lot of people open-source code so that it might be useful for other people?
Not numbers of downloads or hoping to gain popularity, but to literally help the community.
I read other people’s open source code all the time to try and understand things. I can’t be the only one.
What a strange article. Can I not “pin” his repo at a specific version in my project, thus making it a stable dependency? If it’s small and readable, that’s just as good as writing it yourself. What is dying?
so that it might be useful for other people?
Even that isn't necessary. I do it because I want to share cool things, even if they're not useful. The world didn't need another crossword puzzle creator, I just felt like writing one.
Absolutely, “useful” is a broad term in this case.
It is always interesting to see how people implement things!
Why do people buy organic fruits and vegetables?
I care about where the code comes from. I like the community to come together on a good solution rather than have one spat out of unknown quality. I want to both test and have that community working together towards a common goal. Fundamentally, I think that sharing our answers and cataloguing them as developers is a good strategy. Way better than AI.
If AI is ultimately borrowing its answers from open source, wouldn’t it be better to just go use open source? At least then there’s some hope that if people find issues and edge cases that I might get those fixes in the future. Why limit your upside to zero? Like, I can put my entire program in one source file maintained by just me but it doesn’t mean I should. Is this an argument against why libraries are a good idea?
I am not much of a Javascript developer; I write mostly Python. And python is famously very much "batteries included", so these "small" libraries are part of the standard library. I never look at the details unless something has gone quite wrong. I suspect very few people use such libraries as learning opportunities in JS either; they just add it to packages.json and never look back. So I don't think the loss the author talks about is that big a deal.
If people genuinely take this approach though I think you miss out on collective problem solving. A dependency is a risk, yes, but it's also an opportunity for other people to have found the bugs that you no longer have to suffer.