2025 Open Source Predictions Post

_posts/2025-01-09-2025-open-source-predictions.md

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-date: 2025-01-08 10:44:00 +0100
+date: 2025-01-08 18:44:00 +0100
 title: 2025 Open Source Predictions
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 Inspired by [Ben Cotton’s 2025 Open Source Predictions](https://duckalignment.academy/open-source-trends-2025/), I decided to do a little predicting of my own. My mind has been on AI and how I can leverage it so that has colored a lot of my predictions. I do not mean to imply that AI is the most important thing that will happen in 2025.
 
-## Open Source Continues to Democratize Access to LLMs
+## Open Source Continues To Democratize Access To LLMs
 
-More developer tooling to leverage LLMs is coming this year. The game of trying to one-shot entire programs is going to morph into a new emphasis on working with code without actually editing it. Our current approach on integrating with existing editors, such as [Cline](https://github.com/cline/cline) for Visual Studio Code and, my go-to tool of choice, “terminal” editors like [Aider](https://aider.chat/) is not going to solve this problem directly. New ideas will be explored.
+More developer tooling to leverage LLMs is coming this year. The game of trying to one-shot entire programs is going to morph into a new emphasis on working with code without personally editing it. Our current approaches of integrating with existing editors, such as [Cline](https://github.com/cline/cline) in Visual Studio Code and, my go-to tool of choice, “terminal” editors like [Aider](https://aider.chat/) is not going to solve this problem directly. New ideas will be explored.
 
 We will not get there this year, however there will be a large number of new tools focused on having an LLM/AI driven inner loop. Specifically, the user will prompt with the next feature or bug to fix to implement and the AI will drive the entire inner loop until complete. Doing this will require creativity in the face of LLM non-determinism and context windows. Startups and open source developers are likely to find this challenge exciting, investing significant time and resources into solving it.
 
-Open source tools will drive most of this democratization. Selling dev tools is challenging; few developers are willing to pay, and many corporate developers avoid seeking managerial approval. They will want to download something, get it working and get the same amount done in less time without their task masters being any wiser.
+Open source tools will drive most of this democratization. Selling dev tools is challenging; few developers are willing to pay and many corporate developers avoid seeking managerial approval. They will want to download something, get it working and get the same amount done in less time without their task masters being any wiser.
 
 This is an opportunity for open source projects to attract contributors and for open source, in general, to once again, prove that collaboration beats silos.
 
-## LLMs are a Threat to Open Source
+## LLMs Are A Threat To Open Source
 
 The rise of generative AI and its accessibility through various tools poses a threat to open source. Hand-in-hand with the increase in people using LLMs to develop software will be an increase in people viewing software purely as a revenue generator. Open source business models are still messy, primarily because open source itself isn’t a business model, contrary to popular belief. Therefore these folks are likely to fall hard into the proprietary code camp.
 
@@ -38,16 +38,16 @@ Continuing with our theme on strange bedfellows, one place we aren’t seeing th
 
 Companies will follow the rules and the law. When what they have to do is no longer convenient they will choose another legal path. They are playing for revenue not idealism. So far, this has been rewarded as their revenue providers (i.e. customers) have so far made it clear that license and open source is far down on their list of reasons to part with cash.
 
-## Projects need AI
+## Projects Need AI
 
-Contributions of documentation and being present to help users are still hard to come by for most projects. Documentation is hard to keep up-to-date and usually suffers from terrible tool chains and inner loop processes. The lack of project product management means that use cases are either in a developers head and hyper specific or an afterthought beyond some immediate need which has minimal provided context. In order to succeed here you need scale which mostly serves to make the funnel big enough to have the small percentage of contributors matter. Either that or you need something where it is natural to want to share your successes and by accident or purposefully help others achieve their goals too. A great example of a community that has this is in spades is Home Assistant.
+Contributions of documentation and being present to help users are still hard to come by for most projects. Documentation is hard to keep up-to-date and usually suffers from terrible tool chains and inner loop processes. The lack of project product management means that use cases are either in a developers head and hyper specific or an afterthought beyond some immediate need which has minimal provided context. In order to succeed here you need scale which mostly serves to make the funnel big enough to have the small percentage of contributors matter. Absent that you need something where it is natural to want to share your successes and by accident or purposefully help others achieve their goals too. A great example of a community that has this is in spades is Home Assistant.
 
 Everyone else needs an LLM, despite their tendency to MSU (hallucinate). LLMs can be trained to help users where the docs fail or don’t exist. They can help users restate their problems in terms of solutions the project can actually provide (a huge new user issue). Critically, LLMs take the mountain of mailing lists and chats and make them something consumable and usable. That said, no one has really figured out how to do this at scale yet in a way that is reproducible by communities.
 
 As an aside, if this problem interests you, I am thinking about it right now and open to some collaboration. If you have solved this problem already, hit me up and save me a lot of time.
 
-## Project conferences are over
+## Project Conferences Are Over
 
 Building on [Ben’s 2025 prediction](https://duckalignment.academy/open-source-trends-2025/#Inequity), I believe 2025 will mark the end of traditional project conferences. While contributors will still get together, all pretense that the non-contributor community should care and show up is going to be gone. These meetups, increasingly virtual-only, are places to make project plans and friends. These are not places to discuss the intersection where the software becomes useful to the user.
 
-That conversation takes place at conferences that bring together users and lots of different solutions and options. These kinds of conferences and, as Ben points out, places where business can do business are likely to be the only survivors.
+The intersection conversation takes place at conferences that bring together users and lots of different solutions and options. These kinds of conferences are, as Ben points out, places where businesses can do business and are likely to be the only survivors.