With free software you can validate the code quality and tweak and share code as you wish. With AI slop becoming more prevalent this means choosing quality software is much easier. This is especially true given that many proprietary software companies are switching to AI which will harm them in the long run.
In short, free software is human focused. It doesn’t have economic incentives for the most part so it will always be as good as the community around it.
Except for all the script kiddies vibe-coding FOSS apps as well. The problem with the whole “validate the code quality” concept is that the potential user needs to know how to do so. The majority of users don’t.
This precisely.
I consider myself a power-user. I’m going to push my system as far as j can and if I break it I either fix it or deal with it.
I also can’t code anything past “hello world” in C++ and Java, which means my ability to validate code for anything is pretty much nil. I might be able to parse a function here or there if I really dedicate to reading through every single character, but chances of my understanding the how and why of that specific function are slimmer than my chances of understanding it in the first place.
If we really want digital security, air-gapped machines running pre-2024 versions of everything is going to be the only real option. But now we’re kneecapping ourselves.
So I guess, uh, who wants to go back to Fortran cards?
I mean, there were plenty of shitty quality FOSS projects before AI, some of them even got popular. AI doesn’t have a monopoly on bad code.
I’d pull something, it would be a buggy mess and I didn’t need to take apart the codebase to figure out it was terrible.
Maybe there are enough objective metrics of code quality that this could be automated? It’s not just code quality though, I worry about using low effort software because maybe it will be abandoned and stop working because of broken dependencies or whatever and I’ll have wasted my time learning to use it.
This… Is a normal thing…? As in, software becoming old and outdated and replaced by something newer and better by a given metric. AIM to ICQ to Skype to Zoom to Discord to… Some of them stick around, some simply die out. As long as personal computing devices exist, you will be learning new software unless you go full Amish.
Code quality automation is a big business. SonarQube, Aikido, ghql etc there’s a lot of them. No FOSS ones though. But sonarqube has a good community edition
I always use sonarqube when i vibecode. End product is so much nicer when you have some hard rules on quality. Like function complexity, duplicated code % test coverage % etc etc