AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet

Over the weekend, tech news site RS Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open- source library maintainer. I'll leave some links if you want to know the details, but the irony here is the maintainer, Scott Sham, and I'm sorry if I'm butchering your name here. He was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging its AI slop code. It's likely that the bot was running through someone's local agentic AI instance running OpenClaw and the guy who built that was just hired by OpenAI to quote work on bringing agents to everyone. You'll have to forgive me if I'm just not feeling enthusiastic about that. It it feels like every AI company is channeling Russ Hanaman vibes lately. >> All of a sudden, I'm 22 years young and I'm worth 1.2b. Last month, even before OpenClaw was released, curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg dropped bug bounties because AI slop resulted in actual useful vulnerability reports going down from 15% all the way to 5%. And that's not the worst of it. The authors of these bug reports seem to have a more entitled attitude despite not having done a lick of real work here. They try to inflate the security impact of the so-called bugs that their AIs encounter because they don't really care about curl and they don't care about Daniel or other open source maintainers. They just want to grab quick cash using their private AI army. I manage over 300 open source projects and while many of them are more niche than curl or mattplot liib, I've seen my own increase in AI slot PRs and it's gotten so bad GitHub added a feature to disable poll requests entirely. Pull requests are like the fundamental thing that made GitHub popular, making it easy to contribute back to the software that we use and love. And now we're seeing that closed off. The problem is AI slop generation is getting easier, but it's not getting that much smarter. We we've hit a plateau where code generation is pretty good. I mean, I used local open models to help me migrate my blog from Drupal to Hugo, and I admit it's really helpful if you know what you're doing with it, but it's not really improving like it did the past few years. and it can't overcome human skill gaps. The problem is the humans who review the code that that are responsible for like the useful software that keeps our systems going, they don't have infinite resources, unlike AI companies. Some people say in response like we should let AI take over code reviews, too. But that's not the answer here. If you're running a little weather dashboard or building a little toy server for your home lab, fine. But I'm not going to run my production apps, the things that actually make me money or could cause harm if they break on unreviewed AI slop code. And for every story about the stuff that gets traction, there are hundred more that don't get reported. If this was a problem already before Open Claw's release, this hiring by OpenAI is going to make it worse by democratizing it even further. Right now, this AI craze feels the same as the crypto and NFT booms with the same signs of insane behavior and weird optimism. The only difference is there's more useful purposes for LLMs and machine learning, so the scammers can kind of point to those things as they bring down everything good in the name of their AI god. Since my last main channel video on AI coming for us all, we now have hard drives as the new shortage to watch out for, as Western Digital just announced they've already sold through all their inventory for this year, and they're already selling through a lot for 2027 and 2028. There are some people out there believing the AI bubble isn't a bubble, but those people are misguided. Just like the AI that hallucinated the quotes in that RS Technica article, people are saying this time it's different, but it's not. The same signs are there from other crashes. The big question I have is how many other things are we going to let AI companies destroy before they have to pay their dues? Until next time, I'm Jeff Gearling.

This is why we can't have nice things. Referenced in this video: - Ars Technica's redaction: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/after-a-routine-code-rejection-an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-someone-by-name/ - Ars Technica Author's response: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p - Scott Shambaugh's post on AI Agent Hit Piece: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ - OpenClaw: https://openclaw.ai - OpenClaw author moves to OpenAI: https://steipete.me/posts/2026/openclaw - The End of the Curl Bug Bounty: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/01/26/the-end-of-the-curl-bug-bounty/ - My GitHub: https://github.com/geerlingguy - GitHub's new PR settings: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-13-new-repository-settings-for-configuring-pull-request-access/ - My blog migration from Drupal to Hugo: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/migrating-13000-comments-from-drupal-to-hugo/ - Yahoo article on NFT Fallout: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/what-happened-to-nfts-094039263.html - PCPartPicker Hard Drive price trends: https://pcpartpicker.com/trends/price/internal-hard-drive/ - Western Digital is sold out of hard drives for 2026: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/hdds/western-digital-is-already-sold-out-of-hard-drives-for-all-of-2026-chief-says-some-long-term-agreements-for-2027-and-2028-already-in-place Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/geerlingguy Sponsor me on GitHub: https://github.com/sponsors/geerlingguy Merch: https://www.redshirtjeff.com 2nd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GeerlingEngineering 3rd Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Level2Jeff