nzach

I used to try a few OSS projects before building anything myself. Recently, with LLM coding assistants/agents, I’m spinning up small, single-purpose tools tailored to my workflow. They’re not “better” than mature OSS (in fact they are often brittle and narrowly scoped) but they solve my exact problem faster than learning how to install, configure and use a new tool.

And it got me thinking, if more developers do this what happens to OSS?

Do incentives to file issues, write docs, or contribute upstream drop when it’s so easy to build a bespoke tool?

Do we risk fragmentation into many private one-offs instead of shared libraries?

For maintainers: are you seeing fewer users, less feedback, or different kinds of contributions?

Curious to hear both individual and maintainer perspectives, and what you’re actually observing in 2025.