Daily Shaarli
April 29, 2026
Much of the software that we encounter on a daily basis, including the bulk of the infrastructure on which the internet runs, is grounded in a decades-old paradigm called “Free and Open Source Software.” FOSS developers distribute their work under permissive licenses that allow others to use, share, modify and redistribute the resulting code for free. LLM use threatens that paradigm, in part by unleashing a deluge of difficult-to-evaluate, vibe-coded contributions, but perhaps more critically, by eroding FOSS’s social component.
One of the fundamental deceptions of AI is that it reduces work. It looks that way only because you receive the output through a very narrow aperture, creating the illusion of ease.
We've been a little bit too romantic about the idea that we should have employees and give people long-term job security. I think that got us into a place where, reaching the heights of Monument Valley 3 [production], contractors were always a relatively low percentage of our employee base. I think that's something we're looking to change going forward.
I think going forward, we'll see that we've got a core team and any growth will come through contractors, which is something I hate about the industry. I've been in the industry for 20 years, and those of us who joined in the early 2000s, we had it very good. You want to be able to give that kind of stability [...] but I think that's a shift in how we want to work with people going forward.