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If AI is so good at coding - where are the open source contributions?
(pivot-to-ai.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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Programming
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As a dumb question from someone who doesn't code, what if closed source organizations have different needs than open source projects?
Open source projects seem to hinge a lot more on incremental improvements and change only for the benefit of users. In contrast, closed source organizations seem to use code more to quickly develop a new product or change that justifies money. Maybe closed source organizations are more willing to accept slop code that is bad but can barely work versus open source which won't?
most software isn't public-facing at all (neither open source nor closed source), it's business-internal software (which runs a specific business and implements its business logic), so most of the people who are talking about coding with AI are also talking mainly about this kind of business-internal software.
Does business internal software need to be optimized?
Need to be optimised for what? (To optimise is always making trade-offs, reducing some property of the software in pursuit of some optimised ideal; what ideal are you referring to?)
And I'm not clear on how that question is related to the use of LLMs to generate code. Is there a connection you're drawing between those?
So I was trying to make a statement that the developers of AI for coding may not have the high bar for quality and optimization that closed source developers would have, then was told that the major market was internal business code.
So, I asked, do companies need code that runs quickly on the systems that they are installed on to perform their function. For instance, can an unqualified programmer use AI code to build an internal corporate system rather than have to pay for a more qualified programmer's time either as an internal hire or producing.
(Thank you, this indirectly answers one question: the specific optimisation you're asking about, it seems, is optimised speed of execution when deployed in production. By stating that as the ideal to be optimised, necessarily other properties are secondary and can be worse than optimal.)
Some do pursue that ideal, yes. For example: many businesses seek to deploy their internal applications on hosted environments where they pay not for a machine instance, but for seconds of execution time. By doing this they pay only when the application happens to be running (on a third-party's managed environment, who will charge them for the service). If they can optimise the run-time of their application for any particular task, they are paying less in hosting costs under such an agreement.
This is a question now about paying for the time spent by people to develop and maintain the application, I think? Which is thoroughly different from the time the application spends running a task. Again, I don't see clearly how "optimise the application for execution speed" is related to this question.