Will OSS die with AI?

If everyone can generate code with agents, will OSS still matter? Short answer: no. Open source won’t die any time soon.

Here’s why.

Shared responsibility

A good OSS project is not just “some code on GitHub.” It is packaging, docs, tests, support, bug fixes, security patches, and upgrades to new language and framework versions.

With AI-generated code, you own all of that. The model won’t carry accountability for your product or your business. Good open-source projects usually have active maintainers, a reputation to protect, and a community that cares. When you rely only on in-house, AI-generated snippets, you become the maintainer, release engineer, and support team — for everything.

Knowledge, captured in code

Strong OSS projects are built by people who already learned the hard lessons: what works, what fails, and why. They turn that tacit knowledge into code and docs.

When engineers “vibe-code” a solution with an agent, the output often lacks context and rationale. Agents optimize for “what fits the prompt,” not for years of operational history. OSS bakes that experience in: battle-tested defaults, edge-case handling, and clear trade-offs you can read and understand.

Community QA at scale

Many eyes, many environments. Users run the same library on different OSes, CPUs, clouds, locales, time zones, and weird network setups.

Private agent-output hides bugs until they bite you in production. And that becomes your problem.