Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some…
there’s at least one guy i know of on github whose claim to fame is he finds code in existing node codebases by big corpos that’s duplicated, breaks it out into a library, then PRs the original codebase with “instead of doing <this part> manually, switch to depending on this library”, then adds to his profile “my code is used by <big corpo>”. he had thousands of libraries like that last i checked, most of them less than ten lines of code. the manifest and other boilerplate is way larger than the actual code.
Your node_modules directory can get so bloated that the community came up with different package managers just for deduplication! pnpm, for example, makes one global-adjacent cache, and then just symlinks the dependencies as needed. This is because the regular npm doesn’t, because what if the package changed between the 20ms since I downloaded it for nuxt? (Sorry Nuxt users, had to pick a name)
ever heard of node.js?
Heard, not used though. Jokes about isEven™ too, but I never thought it goes like this in anything intended for external use
there’s at least one guy i know of on github whose claim to fame is he finds code in existing node codebases by big corpos that’s duplicated, breaks it out into a library, then PRs the original codebase with “instead of doing <this part> manually, switch to depending on this library”, then adds to his profile “my code is used by <big corpo>”. he had thousands of libraries like that last i checked, most of them less than ten lines of code. the manifest and other boilerplate is way larger than the actual code.
Damn. isEven come alive. But hilarious enough to watch someone do it :)
Your
node_modulesdirectory can get so bloated that the community came up with different package managers just for deduplication!pnpm, for example, makes one global-adjacent cache, and then just symlinks the dependencies as needed. This is because the regularnpmdoesn’t, because what if the package changed between the 20ms since I downloaded it fornuxt? (Sorry Nuxt users, had to pick a name)Given an example from another reply… yeah. Things are fucked