Fueling Open Source with Vibes & Money
Some economists published a paper last month titled “Vibe Coding Kills Open Source”. They hypothesized that, because agentic coding relieves human devs of direct interaction with the Open Source projects on which they depend, attention-based business models adjacent to those dependencies are set to collapse, even if (agentic) usage grows. In other words, you can’t upsell agents in the docs.
As they were going to press, Tailwind dramatically proved them right. The problem is real, and affects real people. My heart goes out to them.
However, to say vibe coding kills Open Source is only true if we identify “Open Source” with this type of business model. Yet, agreeing with what Cramer and many before him have asserted, Open Source is not a business model at all. This is why I prefer the word “subsidize” instead of “sustain” (as is used in the paper) to name what, e.g., the company Tailwind Labs Inc. does relative to the Tailwind CSS Open Source project. Open Source projects are a unique entity that doesn’t fit neatly into conventional economic models, so the imprecision of conventional economists is understandable.
Ways to Fund Open Source
I do agree with the conclusion of the vibe coding paper, that the rise of AI agents increases the pressure to “redesign the business models and institutions that channel value back to OSS maintainers” (p. 27). I’ve spoken before about the three levers we have available to pull:
- Commercialization—This is the subsidization that Tailwind Labs has been attempting, and which is now under threat.
- Social Validation—Open Source Pledge and Open Source Endowment are two promising redesigns with which I am directly involved.
- Taxation—Sovereign Tech Fund is the best example here.
The economists propose a metering approach that they call the “Spotify model” (p. 23; cf. 27). I proposed something similar a couple years ago, a line-item for Open Source on the invoices of major cloud providers or other infrastructure companies. I see it as the social-validation approach that would feel most like taxation. As the paper authors say, “[t]he infrastructure for these interventions largely exists; what is needed is coordination and will” (p. 28). I don’t disagree. I even had a couple conversations with candidate companies at the time, which made crystal clear that “coordination and will” are quite costly.
Also, artists don’t love Spotify (here is Spotify’s rejoinder). As Mitchell Hashimoto has said, “I don’t know if you can reach a ‘more’ that is socially accepted to be good enough unless it is forced, taxed.”
So, yes. Let’s keep trying all the things to fund Open Source—whether subsidy or sustenance. But let’s not confuse the decline of one adjacent business model with the death of Open Source, which is a community-based development model.
Vibe Coding Rocket Fuel
The title of the paper rings hollow on closer inspection … and also on a surface level. Exhibit A: Peter Steinberger has vibe-coded the most explosively popular project in Open Source history, OpenClaw. In three months it has become the 14th-most popular project on GitHub, recently overtaking the official Linux mirror in number of stars, with React (the last “non-aggregator” project) likely to fall in a week or so.
Personal crises notwithstanding, the energy here cannot be denied. There are scores of OpenClaw meetups coming up. Peter is putting his MIT-licensed project into a foundation rather than commercializing it. Open Source, a community-based development model, has never been more back.
Yes, vibe-coding creates a slop PR problem in the short term. Workarounds like Mitchell’s vouch and GitHub’s more coordinated efforts will dampen this relatively soon.
On the flip side, vibe coding enables competent developers to make contributions they never would have found time for otherwise. Here are a couple anecdotal examples from my friend BYK. Cloudflare’s Steve Faulkner rebuilt all of Next.js in a week (both the original and the replacement are MIT-licensed). Many front-runners—Armin Ronacher, Mitchell Hashimoto, Salvatore Sanfilippo, Evan You, Guido van Rossum, Linus Torvalds—have embraced agentic coding. In fact, Tailwind founder Adam Wathan is among them.
So, no. Vibe coding does not kill Open Source. Vibe coding accelerates Open Source—and it requires that we accelerate the shift to truly sustainable funding paradigms that are in line with Open Source’s nature as a gift community and not a market economy. Wanna help? We made Endowment and Pledge just for you. 🦞😎🦞