My thoughts there are the AI tools brings about a whole new challenge that they are just completely walking away from, and that’s fine, but to say community is lost is absurd. It sounds like their community exploded and they decided it was too hard to collaborate now that there is 10x the number of participants.
New challenges that need to be solved are automation frameworks for ensuring quality of the decomp, automated testing to ensure faithful reproduction of bugs, etc. tons of more things that need to be done.
So walking away when they pioneered the community is one thing, if they want to leave the next chapter for someone else to pick up the reigns, but refusing to acknowledge the new community is quite frankly disheartening.
The bit about vibecoded forks sapping attention is really important, though.
It’s different than the usual “solo dev fork drama.” Vibeforks spawn in the dozens, often go out of the way to draw attention, fizzle out quickly and leave precisely nothing constructive behind. They actively drain the main project.
It seems like a small thing, but these kinds of projects gain manpower and motivation through exposure. I’m seeing this exact same thing erode communities in other niches, too.
My point is that this is the reason to popularize a foundational framework that these vibe coders can pull from and have a baseline quality to them. Standardized license, skeleton project plan, etc. Then even if they are abandoned by the original, it could still be useful if further development is needed and it should meet a minimum quality standard.
My thoughts there are the AI tools brings about a whole new challenge that they are just completely walking away from, and that’s fine, but to say community is lost is absurd. It sounds like their community exploded and they decided it was too hard to collaborate now that there is 10x the number of participants.
New challenges that need to be solved are automation frameworks for ensuring quality of the decomp, automated testing to ensure faithful reproduction of bugs, etc. tons of more things that need to be done.
So walking away when they pioneered the community is one thing, if they want to leave the next chapter for someone else to pick up the reigns, but refusing to acknowledge the new community is quite frankly disheartening.
The bit about vibecoded forks sapping attention is really important, though.
It’s different than the usual “solo dev fork drama.” Vibeforks spawn in the dozens, often go out of the way to draw attention, fizzle out quickly and leave precisely nothing constructive behind. They actively drain the main project.
It seems like a small thing, but these kinds of projects gain manpower and motivation through exposure. I’m seeing this exact same thing erode communities in other niches, too.
My point is that this is the reason to popularize a foundational framework that these vibe coders can pull from and have a baseline quality to them. Standardized license, skeleton project plan, etc. Then even if they are abandoned by the original, it could still be useful if further development is needed and it should meet a minimum quality standard.
I am all for reviving abandoned projects. For sure.
But I just don’t want slimey forks to be the reason it is abandoned, either.
Sure expect the new peoe aren’t looming for community and just doing everything themselves