It has become relatively cheap now to take an existing open source project with a permissive license, fork it and tailor it to your needs. At the same time, the internet is saturated with new projects generated with coding agents and our attention span cannot grow.
I am sure I am not alone having the following experience: there is an open source project I love, but it is missing one or 2 features that should be straight forward to implement. I create feature requests, but the author has no time to even look into them or deems them as the wrong fit or direction for the project. I create a minimal pull request with the aid of a coding agent, as I am not versed on the programming language used for the project, but the PR stays on with no signs of being reviewed anytime soon and will likely be rejected due to the use of AI. Of course, the easiest thing to do now is to simply use the fork of the project I put together for the pull-request.
But why stop there? Now I have added MacOS support for a C application that was targeting Linux exclusively and I am even porting it to Rust just so I can learn the language while I iterate over it. I tried sharing the initiative with others, but there is too much noise for anyone to pay attention. How many forests will be burnt so we can reinvent the wheel over and over? I am honestly not sure of how to feel about the direction in which software engineering is going. So many conflicting feelings.
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