Jamie Tanna (Nov 17 2025 at 11:47): Jamie Tanna (Nov 17 2025 at 11:47):Trying to not call you out negatively, @Jerod Santo, but thinking about what place Open Source has when everyone's building things from scratch with LLMs, and wrote some thoughts:
https://www.jvt.me/posts/2025/11/17/llm-oss/
I know you've mentioned you've got an upcoming post so interested to ready more
Jerod Santo (Nov 17 2025 at 15:22):Good thoughts, I'm wrestling with this as well. On the margins, I think it's inevitable that codegen trends upward and open source (in the small) trends downward. (Unless we are already enjoying Peak LLM.)
I can see both the pros and cons to this inevitability, but as a guy who has mostly been an open source consumer (while contributing back as much as it made sense/possible) over the course of my career, I'm leaning toward it being more good than bad.
At least, that's my current stance on the topic! We'll see how I feel tomorrow :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:
Ron Waldon-Howe (Nov 17 2025 at 18:42):Dan Abramov had some loosely-related posts on Blue sky recently on this:
Ron Waldon-Howe (Nov 17 2025 at 18:43):they're bullish on local LLMs, once all the VC/PE money dries up and all the cloud-hosted LLMs need sustainable business models (i.e. actually need to charge more money than they spend, what a concept)
Ron Waldon-Howe (Nov 17 2025 at 18:45):so, in that light, maybe LLM usage will be similar to folks that compile from source rather than download: most people won't bother
Ron Waldon-Howe (Nov 17 2025 at 18:47):and if most people are preferring to download rather than LLM-generate, then maybe this won't impact the usage of open source too much?
Ron Waldon-Howe (Nov 17 2025 at 18:51):all of that assumes the VC/PE money will dry up, however, and the counter example is Uber which has lit 10s of billions of dollars on fire, has never been profitable (effectively cooks the books to seem otherwise), and yet is still around
i'm really hoping we, as a species, stop rewarding unsustainable business models at some point :fingers_crossed:
Jamie Tanna (Nov 17 2025 at 22:03):Thanks for sharing on News btw!
Jamie Tanna (Nov 17 2025 at 22:04):"compile from source" is a really interesting angle on this - I wonder if that will be how it goes :eyes:
Daniel Buckmaster (Nov 18 2025 at 09:13):This recently came across my RSS also - https://nolanlawson.com/2025/11/16/the-fate-of-small-open-source/
EDIT: and of course now I open Jamie's article and see you cited this :laughing:
Daniel Buckmaster (Nov 18 2025 at 09:26):i'm really hoping we, as a species, stop rewarding unsustainable business models at some point
Maybe tech companies will become the new beneficiaries of Modern Monetary Theory - if VCs are willing to prop up the currency supply then who's to tell them otherwise!
Last updated: Dec 14 2025 at 10:42 UTC