At some point the project also just gets hard to maintain with AI, you burn ever increasing tokens the bigger a project gets and AI produces awful code for the purpose of maintenance by hand. Once the bugs start rolling in they realise the AI can’t fix them, they certainly can’t afford to have it constantly load the entire project as context and they don’t know how to fix it themselves and the tech debt produced is immense. So the projects get shut down.

There was a Ted Talk a while back (I can’t remember who) where they said “I have always wanted to give a Ted Talk… what I realized I really wanted was to say I had given a Ted Talk”. Meaning they want to be known as someone who had given a Ted Talk, not actually go through the process of writing and delivering the Talk.

People who write open source code do it because they like the process of writing, just like an author enjoys writing books. LLMs are for people who just want to be able to say they have written a book. People who slop-code aren’t actually interested in learning how to code. Which is a fine toy for them to play with, but not sustainable (or reliable for others to use).