"The source code was the moat. But not anymore" by Philip O'Toole https://philipotoole.com/the-source-code-was-the-moat-no-longer/
This is what I started realizing recently. It has forced me into a severe reckoning because I have spent a large part of my career contributing to and maintaining open source.
Remember the GitHub Arctic Code Vault? A veritable "strategic reserve" of open source code? I felt proud to be a part of this, but it feels almost absurd now, because what seems most likely to endure is less the code and more the weights, of which I contributed a small fraction, and my contribution isn't even legible. https://archiveprogram.github.com/
Maybe someone will just list every open source contributor on GitHub in 2022 and say "they contributed to the agentic brain," but it's far less satisfying.
I mentioned this in a recent post, but the fact that I could easily, with one prompt, reproduce the kind of work that used to take me years to produce, is a bitter pill to swallow. My conclusion is that having working code is very low-value in 2026, and the bar for a worthwhile open source project just shot through the roof. https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/31/building-a-browser-api-in-one-shot/
I've said this a dozen times, but I get no satisfaction out of any of the things I've been saying lately. If anything, I feel like I'm just sounding the alarm.
@nolan "if Earth is to be remembered at all, it will most likely be for the quality of its manual labour"
@nolan one of my favourite quotes from scifi ever; it's very reminiscent of Douglas Adams, isn't it?
