I’ve been vibe-coding a lot lately. Like, a lot a lot. Maybe not quite the “AI psychosis” Andrej Karpathy recently joked about on No Priors, but not wildly far off either.[1] But the more I vibe, the more a thought recurs, i.e. that AI coding agents may be about to make free software matter more than it ever has. Not open source in the bland corporate sense. I mean free software in Stallman’s sense: software that gives users the freedom to run it, study it, modify it, and share it. Even for the relatively few who were aware of the distinction, it has felt mostly academic for a long time. SaaS made it hard to care software freedom because most people never saw or touched the source code of software they depended on in the first place. The code lived on someone else’s servers, the vendor handled operations, and the practical question became convenience, not freedom. Agents change that. If an agent can read a codebase, understand it, and modify it on your behalf, then access to source code stops being a symbolic right for programmers and becomes a practical capability for far more people. Suddenly the difference between software you can change and software you can only beg starts to really matter. And I don’t just think this in the abstract. I recently tried to get an AI agent to customize a SaaS app for me, and the experience made the whole problem very concrete very fast. Free software once mattered deeply, but faded when SaaS made those freedoms feel irrelevant. In 1980, Richard Stallman[2] was a programmer at MIT’s AI Lab, and he had a problem with a printer. The lab had gotten a new Xerox laser printer, and it kept jamming. Stallman wanted to fix the issue — or at least add a feature to notify users when their print jobs got stuck — but Xerox wouldn’t give him the source code. The printer’s software was proprietary. This seems like a small thing. It was not a small thing to Stallman. He’d grown up in a computing culture where sharing code was the norm. When you go...
First seen: 2026-03-29 22:58
Last seen: 2026-03-29 23:59