1) I think that is a really interesting insight. I have never done the above myself, but often I don't "tinker" with things because the amount of energy it would take me to JUST GET IT RUNNING is large, and I might end up borking my own system in doing so.
An LLM in a VM can reasonably and safely completely work out on its own how to run some software. I'd never thought about really doing that as a reflexive thing when I am curious. Good thought.
2) I wonder if this is going to be a bifurcation. Where open source software is looked at far more often than in the past because it can actually be "live" investigated (not just have the code reviewed) with little effort?
3) On the opposite of 2, I wonder how many people are going to start "close sourcing" their software, because previously they could be open source, and rely on the inertia of actually getting it running to be enough to support a consultancy service or whatever. If getting it running is trivial, then maybe I need your service less, I just need the code. Might result in different business models?
I do think there's a bit of a risk there, actually.
It's not just the consultancy thing - it's the competitive advantage of the software itself.
Used to be that you could release open source safe in the knowledge that few people would extract core parts that they need and discard the rest, or fork the project in another direction, because the friction was too much. Better value for people to contribute to your project directly, which provides a great deal of value in exchange for releasing it in the first place.
Now... if you invent some brilliant new database indexing scheme and release it as open source, I can point my coding agent at your code and have it imitate your new insight in a few minutes.
For some projects that's fine, but for projects that intended to commercialize that's not ideal at all.
So yeah, I do worry about the way coding agents distort the previous incentives for open source projects.