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How is it helping a lot?
loading story #48492709
I personally find the barrier of starting new (FOSS) projects much lower now days.
What if -- and bear with me here -- that barrier was actually a good thing?
You mean because l337 circles could form better this way?

I think it's great that the barriers are dropping for less technical skilled people to manifest their visions, but we will have to figure out better ways to find the gold among the slop.

I disagree. Bring back elitism and ivory towers. Some projects now benefit from being run by private cabals with their own strict initiation process, which would also guarantee a baseline of quality.

The bazaar model works if everyone is trusted. If you can’t even be sure the person in front of you is even a human, it is time to pack it up.

Both models can exists?

If elite ivory towers produce working products people will use, great.

Free software isn’t a product
Indeed, unfortunately it often is not.

(English is not my first language, but I believe not every product is a commercial product - but just a term for a working result)

Keep in mind I'm still not convinced that 2000s bazaar was better than 90s cathedral (in fact I lean the other direction)
Do they have value? Purpose?

I vibe code shop jigs all the time but I don’t FOSS them because they rarely have value outside my context.

Same - but mine are open source in the sense that they're public on my own Forgejo instance. So no one's gonna bother with em, but technically they are open source.

One exception: I was using an opensource Jellyfin client called findroid but the maintainer had been busy for a long time so a lot of features I wanted had stale PR's. Instead of bugging him I forked & renamed the project and together with Claude built in all the features I personally needed. Just keeping up with upstream now and enjoying my enhanced app. Once the initial dev gets those features in I might switch back. Claude made this really easy. If the maintainer wants my code he's free to take it. Here's the repo https://github.com/midasvo/findroid-ce

I actually got an email from someone who was using it who found a pretty bad bug I hadn't encountered yet and I quickly fixed it. All that time I was still under the impression I was the only user haha.

Value is in the eye of the beholder.

I open source my vibing projects because someone might find them useful. I don't shop them around, I just work in the open because I find it fun and interesting.

Why would they? If someone wanted a half-baked vibecoded project, why wouldn't they just prompt an LLM on their own?
Because they don't have access to the required agents, tokens, etc. Because they have not thought of using a tool like the published one as a solution to whatever problem they're facing. Because it saves them the time going through the vibe coding phase, telling the agent that this lot that needs to be changed for the thing to work. Because publishing the results doesn't keep you or anyone else from not using them by using an agent to build something similar or just building it themselves.
If I planned on vibecoding a project, and during preparation I found a project that loosely fit my model, I may grab it and try to retrofit it to save on token consumption. If that had too many kinks, I'd probably start fresh, but it would be worth the initial attempt IMHO.
It's like... 10 million trello clones in rust with exactly seven commits made on the same day three months ago.
And how's the quality of these vibe-coded new foss projects?