I've observed the same, so many forks of forks of forks happening right now rather than group efforts. But I think this is coming from the fact that PR review is incredibly costly to the maintainer while generating code is fast. I've submitted PRs to open source projects which claim to welcome contributions but the PRs just never get reviewed (this was an issue pre AI too). If you wanted to build something, constantly fighting an uphill battle to get PRs merged is less appealing than just creating your own project where you can work full speed on whatever you want.

I'm not too sure what the future here looks like and if this is even a problem, but things certainly are changing. These days submitting a well written bug report or feature suggestion, or validating existing reports is more useful than sending a PR.

> work together ffs

Right, and that's something I already argued for since the very beginning of GenAI, namely that suddenly being very costly, economically and ecologically, is not that bad if you build upon what exists and collaborate on progress.

... except that's exactly WHY vibecoded project exist : they do NOT have to give a shit with existing codebase and agree on weird rules. They just start from "scratch". In fact I'm convinced there is the Ikea effect at play, namely that the PM of the vibe coded project is emotionally attached, even proud, of the result they think they provided somehow, despite them not actually doing it. Obviously for-profit GenAI companies have a big incentive to maximize token use and will never promote workflows and tool that minimize the one thing they monetize.

So even though I agree in theory, in practice I think there is little to no overlap.

I believe the goal of most of these people is to make money.