Once again I took a mountain of insults for making a video where I said: your vibe-coded project, released on GitHub as open source, I do not care about it, the quality is low, it would have been worth more if you had done it by hand, if you had done it earlier. A pile of insults arrived, and I do not think the point came across well, because some people framed it as if I had something against open source. After the last few years of my life have been dedicated 90-something percent to exactly that, and open source made by hand, at that. I will get there.
Someone else, some idiot, wrote to me: “here is another one saying cars will never be like horses.” As if I were against innovation, as if I were against artificial intelligence. And clearly these people are seeing me maybe for the first time, they do not know who I am, they do not know I have spent a lifetime spreading the word, building things, explaining, that I have lost my hair over this stuff because of how much I believe in it and how much I want others to get it.
The criticism was never about open source
So beyond the idiot who passes by and judges with no context, there is one thing that a lot of other people on LinkedIn completely missed. The criticism is not aimed at open source built with agents, it is not aimed at vibe-coded open source. It is a way of saying that a thing has value if there is effort behind it, a thought, a design, if there is originality, if there are ideas.
A whole freight train of open-source software churned out by vibe coding is not worth a damn. And there is more: plenty of people do it caught up in the excitement, and then think of all the folks they can reach out to to show off this junk. “I will call Piero.” But the first time I see you, I have never met you in my life. “Hey Piero, look at my open project.” Why would I care about your open project, man? Go vibe code it somewhere else. I barely have time to look at the PRs that come in. Why would I spend it staring at your vibe-coded stuff, made by someone who does not even know what open source means and has not even read that code themselves, let alone me? A useless idea, all the chatbots the same, no verticalization, no soul, no idea, no originality. Why would I care about your vibe-coded chatbot, man?
Value comes from scarcity
And again, this has nothing to do with innovation or with open source. It has to do with the fact that, just like with photographs, with texts, with feature films, works of ingenuity as much as works of art have value when only a few people can pull them off, or get there first, or have enough resources. There is an underlying scarcity that ties things together and gives them value.
If everyone can afford to build the chatbot, or the CMS, or the mobile app with two hours of vibe coding and publish it on GitHub just for the sake of it, that thing is worth zero. It is worth zero precisely because anyone can do it, the same way the millions of images published on Instagram are worth zero, the same way TikTok videos are worth zero, unless they are aiming at something else, in which case indirect economies are born where one thing points to another that points to another still.
But software in itself, without even an idea behind it, without scarcity, without effort, without anything: this stuff is garbage. And I am not against innovation, nor against artificial intelligence, nor against open source, it has nothing to do with any of that. I am against crap, because that stuff is worth zero, and I am not going to look at it.
