Three months ago, I decided to build a messenger, originally only for a limited group of users: my friends, family, and a few work colleagues.
After I finished it and people around me started using it, I decided to open source the project. Today, around 400 people from my own environment use it every day, and it works reliably.
I built it with AI—not because I don't know how to develop software or because I lack experience. Quite the opposite. I have more than 20 years of software development experience, and I used that experience to design the architecture, make technical decisions, and build the React Native apps for both iOS and Android. Around 50% of the code was generated with AI, but 0% of the architecture was.
I open-sourced it for a simple reason: maybe someone will use it, maybe someone will learn something from it. Either way, I'm giving it away for free.
Later, I submitted the project to an open-source news website. The administrators accepted it because they believed it was a quality project, even though AI was used during development.
Then I started reading the comments.
Honestly, I was shocked.
About 90% of the comments were negative. Most people hadn't even tried the product—they simply saw "AI-built" and immediately decided it couldn't be good. At the same time, many others left positive feedback, starred the project on GitHub, and appreciated that it was open source.
That experience taught me something.
People often assume that developers are highly rational because of their profession. But sometimes we're just like everyone else—we reject something because it threatens the way we've always worked.
I don't see AI as replacing developers.
I see it as removing repetitive work so developers can spend more time solving real problems.
If I could build a fully functional messenger in just three months—one with many of the features people expect from apps like Telegram—it doesn't mean AI replaced engineering. It means AI helped me spend less time writing boilerplate and more time building the product.
Some people reacted as if I had claimed to be the next Zeus, trying to replace WhatsApp and Telegram overnight.
I wasn't.
I simply built something useful, shared it for free, and wanted to contribute to the open-source community.
Maybe that's exactly what open source is supposed to be about.
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