Will AI kill Open Source? Is it already happening? Or is this just another clickbait title? Well, let’s see. First of all, I am writing this by hand without the help of any artificial intelligence. There is only human intelligence involved here. I will leave it up to you to judge the quality of it, but at least it is real.
I don’t think AI will kill Open Source. It is not about it not being capable of it. I think it is more that we are not going to allow it to happen. Why should we suddenly abandon all practices of reuse and use of proven implementations and libraries over reinventing the wheel ourselves? Why would we let AI rewrite algorithms and functionality that are already implemented in open source projects, verified, and proven to work? That’s where human intelligence comes in. Abandoning all sound practices of software engineering just because we suddenly have a new developer-kid-on-the-block that can vomit out code faster than any human in history? I don’t think so.
After all, human intelligence is human
After all, human intelligence is human. We know that we sometimes make mistakes. AI doesn’t. AI is never wrong unless a human points out that it is. How does this relate to open source again? What if we didn’t have to point out to the AI that it was wrong? What if we got the AI to use components and building blocks from open source libraries and APIs that are verified to be correct? Isn’t that the strength of open source? That multiple human brains have been involved in creating it in collaboration. So, in order to feed the AI with secure, stable, correct building blocks, we need open source.
If there is one thing AI is good at, it is following specifications. Maybe implementations can be generated by AI if the specifications are well-defined enough. Especially if the specifications come with a comprehensive test suite to verify that an implementation implements it correctly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a set of high-quality, widely adopted, interoperable specifications with associated test suites?
Luckily, we do! And that is what Jakarta EE is all about. I will elaborate more on this in future posts. I see that this post is starting to get a little long, so it may be that this will be the first in a series of posts on this topic.
