AI Agents Shift Software to Open Source as Only Option
Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves. All day, every day, they used programs written by others to write programs for others. That observation, from David Crawshaw, has stuck with me because it says something uncomfortable about how we work. We've built an entire ecosystem of tooling, databases, and frameworks where the cost of customizing something to fit your own workflow has always exceeded the benefit. An AI agent that can sync your custom code with upstream releases changes that math. It's not just another code generator. The agent can maintain the tricky part: merging your local changes with a changing codebase, handling rebases, conflicts, and dependency updates. That's the part that makes software customization expensive. And when agents can do that automatically, the cost-benefit equation for closed-source software collapses. Why pay for a black box when you can fork the source, shape it to your e...