⚠️ WARNING

This is an unconsidered rant, and I may well change my mind on a few points.

Late 2025 is when coding agents really took off. First it was with Claude Code, which provided a neat front-end to using Claude to vibe code. Then Goose came along. Finally, OpenCode. You can think of these as a junior developer in your terminal. You don't have to write so much code anymore. Just focus on product.

This will finish off what was left of the Junior Developer role, because the traditional Junior role of writing code and basically doing more scutwork than the senior mentoring them is what the clanker can do. It's easy to get cut up about this, because it is a big shift in the industry. I really feel for anyone who is a junior developer and who graduated in the last five years. It's important to keep a broad view on this subject. Bright people who work hard can succeed anywhere, and I see this really helping bright junior developers more than I see it removing junior developers from existing roles. This isn't the subject of this rant. Mastery is ultimately a human endeavour, and one that won't be mechanised any time sooon.

What I am concerned about is how we're allowing language model developers to extract tremendous value from open source.

This is a recent discussion from Tailwind, a CSS framework which allows rapid iteration of user interfaces. It's pretty good. I use it myself. But it doesn't have much of a future on its current trajectory. Last week, they had to lay off a lot of their development team, because the financials looked so poor. Language models ingest all of the documentation but remove any ability to upsell enterprise versions with SLAs, a common monetisation path for open-source projects. It's all fine and well citing the MIT license granting anyone to do whatever they like with it provided that licenced code is not re-licenced and the user discards all warranty claims. Responses like this don't help either.

I completely get both arguments. Tailwind is based on open-source code, did Tailwind pay it forwards when the Tailwind company raised a venture capital funding round? It's an issue that affects the whole open source movement, and one that is currently an existential crisis without an adequate solution.

I do think there is a case for users to contribute more to projects like this. I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to monetise. People have to eat. Language models pulling documentation out without either checking to see if it's up to date or without at least preserving the "pro pack" advertising seems slightly tasteless to me.