AI coding tools are a mixed blessing for open source: more contributions, worse quality

Open-source projects are seeing a flood of low-quality code submissions as AI tools lower barriers to entry. "For people who are junior to the VLC codebase, the quality of the merge requests we see is abysmal," said VLC's Jean-Baptiste Kempf. Building new features is easier than ever, but maintaining them remains hard. The result challenges the prediction that cheap AI code will kill software companies. The maintenance burden and quality issues suggest the "death of the software engineer" may be premature.

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