What We're No Longer Seeing: AI and the Invisible Newcomer in Open Source
3d 10h ago by programming.dev/u/codeinabox in opensource@programming.dev from blog.stdlib.io
Great write up about the effect of LLM and first point of contact. It still needs to be said however that sometimes the question itself already has an answer and it is buried deep in the other noise. What we can do is make a place that like stackoverflow but without the toxicity
And here's the uncomfortable realization underneath all of it: we were relying on a friction we didn't even know we needed. The playbook for building and sustaining open-source communities—accumulated over decades by a lot of people who took the question seriously—assumed newcomers would keep becoming visible on their own. Nobody wrote that assumption down, because nobody had to. Now that it's failing, the playbook has to change.
This seems to be a common refrain across all of AI-impacted society: we didn’t know we were losing something vital by reducing friction.
Zoe Bee had a video on basically this topic, back in 2023: https://youtu.be/7-_rK0KkB6k