[xianshou]

Rug pulls from foundation labs are one thing, and I agree with the dangers of relying on future breakthroughs, but the open-source state of the art is already pretty amazing. Given the broad availability of open-weight models within under 6 months of SotA (DeepSeek, Qwen, previously Llama) and strong open-source tooling such as Roo and Codex, why would you expect AI-driven engineering to regress to a worse state than what we have today? If every AI company vanished tomorrow, we'd still have powerful automation and years of efficiency gains left from consolidation of tools and standards, all runnable on a single MacBook.

[fhd2]

The problem is the knowledge encoded in the models. It's already pretty hit and miss, hooking up a search engine (or getting human content into the context some other way, e.g. copy pasting relevant StackOverflow answers) makes all the difference.

If people stop bothering to ask and answer questions online, where will the information come from?

Logically speaking, if there's going to be a continuous need for shared Q&A (which I presume), there will be mechanisms for that. So I don't really disagree with you. It's just that having the model just isn't enough, a lot of the time. And even if this sorts itself out eventually, we might be in for some memorable times in-between two good states.