At this point if we have the slightest suspicion that something was generated by an LLM we immediately toss it. Then there’s the people that show up complaining that Claude can’t figure out how to use our stuff. That’s not my problem.

Whatever money it might cost OSS pales in comparison to the amount of time LLMs waste with BS submissions. They scrape everything without so much as a thank you and then throw a pile of crap at you to deal with because they’re not smart enough to figure it out.

But the worst thing is it destroys the community aspect of OSS. Prior to LLMs you would actually communicate with people, and everyone learns in the process. Now there’s a generation who literally only communicate with an LLM about software, and it’s only been around for a few years.

There’s been a significant shift in the last couple months alone, large projects are either closing public submissions or migrating away from GitHub to limit exposure. I’ve started getting ridiculous PRs, even the ones that are semi useful have a 10 page report on why this two line PR exists.

LLMs are crippling OSS from multiple directions at once. Projects do lose out on add revenue, but that is in my opinion the least damaging part of it. Projects are being overwhelmed with BS big reports from AI that’s costing more time than is feasible for free software.