AI and OSS Renaissance

I love all the wonderful stuff that people share on socials about what they built over the holidays. AI assisted coding has certainly opened up the possibility that people who have a specific itch and had no idea how to solve it now have this magical tool to solve their usecase.

I’ve long enjoyed writing simple CLI tools with the UNIX philosophy in mind since I started writing code. These could be as simple as a function my shell rc or could be a long-winded utility script that gets invoked on the terminal.

But I’ll be honest - I suck with frontend. Not for lack of trying though. But LLM assisted coding has been a godsend for me personally when it comes to building tools with nice UX. I still default to writing CLI tools but there are many problems that are better served by a better UX. More importantly, these tools help me learn UX frameworks and patterns.

What’s yet to be seen is the impact this will have on the indie hacker economy. A lot of people make good money by writing a piece of software that solves a particular problem. When the cost of building software goes to 0, these are likely the first people to get affected. What stands between them and a user of their tool is sheer will and a few hours to build what they want.

My only hope is as people build more tools, they open source it as well. The world is better with an OSS renaissance and who knows, this wave of AI tools will usher us in it.