Éric Bréhault: We, open source developers, AI proletarians

I am not anti-AI at all. A good friend of mine is an AI. I don't see him very much lately, he has a drinking problem. 500 liters of water an hour. Not good.

So this is about the consequences of using AI in a community like ours. Ten years ago, in Boston, I gave a talk titled "We, Plone." Let's revisit those topics in the time of today, with AI.

AI is just a tool, right? There are other ways in which you can get code. Debian has approved the use of AI in their code base. For us, the product, the relationship between people, should be preserved. But if you drop the code writing, you lose something.

1. Loss of knowledge

See Ciro's talk right before this one, and epistemic debt. To create some code we may be able to use interpolation: take a working example, and to apply it to a new situation you just change a few things. You understand for example how an adapter works, after initial problems, and now you know how to create a second adapter.

Cognitive surrender. AI generates something, it does not fully work, you ask AI to fix it. Your knowledge becomes inactive. It is memory, but not active anymore. It is starting to be hard again to do something which you were happy to do before.

Coding yourself actually is restful for your mind. Coders using LLMs are less rested than coders without it. They focus on stressful things.

Extrapolation. "Design is not merely about solving problems. It's about discovering what the right problem to solve is, and then solving it." With AIs you jump from the initial problem to a solution, which is then the wrong solution because it solves the wrong problem.

2. Loss of desire

We work for money, it makes sense, you need to pay the rent and the food. But we also work for pleasure. Not everyone has that luxury, but we do.

Compare with chess. It's not because an AI is better at chess, that I stop playing chess against humans.

Vibe coding. Does that give pleasure, besides the fascination that you may initially get at the results? I would rather call it porn coding. It's about getting immediate satisfaction. It gives a feeling of shame: you are proud of what you do yourself, not of what your AI has done.

Developers are grown ups. They are not just executing orders. Vibe coding to me is childish behavior. Impatient. As grown up you should be patient, take care, take responsibility. What you build should be based on your desire, and you should be proud of it. If AI builds it for you, will you still care enough about it to maintain it?

Where is the love? An AI has no will, it does not like someone. If you do something without love, I'm sure an LLM can replace you.

I love coding. I love to code whatever I want. I can imagine what I want, and build it, though of course in an open source community you coordinate with others. I share code because I really like it. Nobody forces me to contribute, I do it because I really like it.

3. Loss of individuation

Individuation: people become theirselves in relation to others. What matters is the connection we have between people. Most of the time, what you know you have learned from someone else. That is how knowledge flows between people.

We have a shared desire for the future. AI only knows about the past. The future is dead memory for it.

Proletarianization of the Mind. Being a proletarian, means that what you do is replaced by a machine. For example during the industrialization. This was considered progress for the world. But the workers in the factory were poorer than the crafts men of before. And they knew less. And their bosses were richer. It gave higher productivity.

Are we in a period where we can say: we need more software. No, we probably have enough. So should AI deliver even more software?

Open source is about time. You read a book, you read it faster, why? So you can read another book? You already have a book. Enjoy it. You have an open source project, you want to start another one? Why? You already have an open source project. If you like open source, you don't need to accellerate. Our product is not software, it is us. We need to grow slowly.

Killing the gift economy. It affects the open source ecosystem. You release a library, it is a gift. Social debt: I owe you, you owe me. We trust each other. We share debt.

You can ask Claude: I don't want dependencies, just rebuild the ones I need. You can do that. But that ignores the gift.

AI is extractivism, it extracts resources from everywhere. Charlotte Del Signore: "They are trapped in a hypnotic trance of productivity". That is actually not about AI, but about people with neurodiversity. They are critical to have, because they think differently. But it applies to the AI problem as well. AI is dangerously neurotypical.

You are coding with very interesting people. To get potential, you need differences. Nobody is normal. If you look for something that is close to normal, that is an LLM: it is average. You want something with diversity. In my open source community I want sparks, fireworks.

We, Plone people. People are important. We are a small community. We can continue building with our own hands.