Devtools must be open source
blog.exe.dev81 points by bryanmikaelian an hour ago
81 points by bryanmikaelian an hour ago
One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.
The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on other people to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.
I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.
Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".
Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.
I'm not habitually modifying the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.
I have sent countless small bug fixes even before, to tools that I use that I could dig into when something was off... No big heavy lifting, but plenty of "tinker on your tools" stuff. And I don't think what I did was that special, so maybe the experiences are different?
The current LLM-driven stuff seems to break down the expectations, and now there are a lot of places which just ignore anything I send in (the same tinkers as before), generally, for a while. Though there are some tools that picked up the pace and actually react faster (so YMMV here too).
But there are few things more frustrating as being half-way. Case to point is LM Studio. It's closed source, has bugs (duh!), and there's at least a GitHub issue tracker to report the bugs -- but then by and large nothing happens to those reported things. It's almost worse than not having an issue tracker (then I could justify never to really touch LM Studio again, this way I keep hoping against hope that reports will turn into fixes and thus I keep using and keep reporting...)
I run a car blog where I get free BMW [tm] and Mercedes [tm] test cars. I do not understand why other people do not realize that cars are free!
Like everything else, modifying code of open-source tools has its cons and pros. The biggest advantage is of course an ability to customize the tool exactly to your needs. The problem is that it makes patching and upgrading impossible. This is the reason plugings exist - they do not break ability to patch the host product. So, if customization cannot be avoided even at the cost of losing ability to patch/upgrade - that would definitely work. Otherwise, plugins is probably the best approach.
I agree that devtools should be open source, but... I very much disagree with the premise that no tools should have config files, options, or plugin systems, and instead when you want to change something like your text editor's font size, you should have an LLM download the code, change the hard-coded value, and rebuild it.
That's just so inefficient and wasteful. Assuming a world in which LLMs do most of the coding work, do we want to burn electricity having the LLM build an options dialog or config file parser once, or do we want to burn electricity millions of times as users want to change any little thing about the software they use?
I really hope what you should expect is my answer to that question isn't controversial.
Having an LLM do bespoke customizations that are unlikely to be interesting to other people? Great, sure. But adding a generally-useful feature to a piece of software, but not caring to try to upstream it? Lame. Lame, lame, lame.
There are some things that should be configurable and some things that you should not be allowed to configure.
Remember you are not working alone. Different people/companies work differently, but nearly every job has - at least once in a while - a time when someone will be ask your computer reading something on your screen with you. vi vs emacs is bad enough, but at least I know how to do minimal navigation, save, and exit from each (I expect that advanced users of those tools can do much more): there are only so many different systems I can learn though, and it is unfair to make everyone have to learn another. Thus emacs should not allow your to customize your environment with local scripts, either it is in base (as IT installed it), or it isn't allowed! (to my knowledge vi/vim doesn't allow this). Similar for other tools, if it isn't easy for someone who isn't an expert: either your company shouldn't allow it at all, or they need to ensure everyone is encouraged to get training (not forced in case you wouldn't do that anyway - but it should be automatic if you want it and you should know you can get it)
Font size - I've worked with nearly blind people who need huge fonts just to see/read. However this is a compromise and they are worse developers for lack of ability to see as much text as a smaller font enables. Don't get me wrong, they are still great developers, but their eyes are a limit to how good they can be. It is thus reasonable to have a configurable accommodation for that. There are a number of other examples where things can be configurable, but the configurations should be controlled and easy to find. (I'm color blind, if you allow color coding that is fine so long as I can find a color that works for me)
I completely agree - we've seen that tools with plugins are really scalable and then allow the better plugins to be folded back into the main tool where they become popular. I've taken that approach with my own dev tools that I've created.
Without any evidence to back it up, my hope is that your criticism in a decade will be the equivalent to "Everybody having a mainframe at home? Do we want to waste a whole room in each and every house just for that?".
Having an embedded scripting engine for large programs is nice for simplicity and keeping configuration modular - it would be messy to need to modify source constantly. It’s not an issue of it being difficult to compile something so much as it being pointlessly difficult to maintain.
> Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.
This sounds like hell. You have unreliable actor redoing the software every night, and every day there is a chance you wake up and find your workflow broken.
And no, "Check that the software works as intended" is not going to cut it, as AI are very, very good at obeying the letter but not the spirit of the ask. Yes, your diffs appear but they lack filenames. You've added this requirements to the prompt? Ok, filenames are back but they are font size 4, unreadably small. You want them well-seen? next week they become size 54, taking entire screen.. This is not a problem with regular AI development - you review the changes and test them a bit. But doing it day-to-day with no overview is just asking for trouble.
I disagree. As if a tool is customized via agents and something goes wrong, it should be the users issue to fix it. Say I want to customize a bank app (or sca tool) to use a nickname instead of my name, if it breaks then who fixes it?
You tell the AI what broke and it fixes it, and this is usually a better experience than contacting support. But what if that fails?
This might not generalize beyond developers, or at least not right away. Even if we’re not doing the upgrades ourselves, we know what a merge conflict is, and we’re probably better at telling the AI what went wrong so it can fix it.
These don’t seem like skills that are all that hard to learn for someone who’s interested. Also, merge conflicts an AI can’t deal automatically likely mean something major changed upstream.
There will be jobs helping people who get into more trouble than they can dig themselves out of. And if you can’t afford that, I guess it’s a learning experience.
It does not even have to break, you and your LLM can introduce subtle bugs or vulnerabilities to a codebase you are not familiar with and there is a userbase of 1 person to catch this.
So, I'm a subscriber/user of exe.dev but even so I was a bit disappointed when the meat.dev tool linked in the article had no screenshots/meaningful docs. So I installed it and was bummed to see it only supported openAI and exe.dev llm integration by default. "You can just fork" - yeah I know, so take it with a grain of salt.
That aside aside, I agree. Since reading this article yesterday I've probably been overthinking an MIT from AGPL license switch for my own project Ouijit (shill time: https://ouijit.com). Its feels a little counterintuitive since AGPL encourages more open source downstream, but at the same time if I have solved some problem other agent harness devs are curious about, I just want them to take the solution without worrying about paying it back/forward.
(Author here.)
FWIW the first version of meat was based on anthropic models, I switched to Oai models because they are faster and just as good right now. This is an astonishing thing to say, but the switch was a single shot prompt using a frontier model. I’m happy to add some selector there, but that is also the point of this article: do you really need me to make it configurable when you can switch the tool over to Anthropic with a single prompt? It’s a strange new world we live in.
On the website: you’re right. I have some side-by-side diff examples I want to turn into a website. I am just short on hours in the day. My real goal is to make the tool compelling enough that I can convince my colleagues that we should build it into Shelley. :)
Website not even needed! Janky terminal screenshot in the repo would have been good enough for me lol.
On another note, the reason I was perusing the blog was because I was curious about more of how exe handles review/quality/testing because you mentioned there being no code review in another post about stripe billings (maybe a different author). So consider this a casual request for more content on reducing delivery bottlenecks :)
This is one of the only fields where the customer (developers) almost never pays for their own tools and instead builds their own or even to compete against another developer. Then, they later realize why human developers in open source burnout so easily.
Not even Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds make money on open source or free software despite preaching it. They actually make money from speaking fees.
"Open source" is now weaponized to price down entire companies to the floor and instead of humans maintaining the software, it is now coding agents doing the work.
Neither the free and open source software movement accounted for this disruption and they have become the new starving artists of the software world.
Torvalds got RedHat and VA Linux stock options and probably has a very good contract with the Linux Foundation.
I like the idea of devtools being open source. I also like them to work, and that's what I value more that philosophical purity.
Take his side project, Meat. I've been chewing on this problem for a while. It's a real problem right now: it sucks to read all this LLM-generated code. It's worthwhile to have an LLM summarize it for you.
The problem with that is this particular problem resists vibe coding. I've talked to a bunch of people who have tried to solve it on the side, and it's all sort of ... ok, but still unsolved.
- As mentioned, it takes a while to run. You can modify your other tools, as described, to smuggle the latency.
- LLMs don't know what you care about, so you have to maintain a list of things that you do care about, which is ever evolving. If you don't give it that, it produces slop.
- If you miss something, it hurts. Another layer of swiss-cheese AI doesn't feel right. If you trust the AI, just ask Claude to summarize its work!
- The summaries feel shareable, but the author of the PR is actually the most tolerate of slop about a PR. Your reviewers definitely don't want to read the output of a vibe-coded tool talking about 60% of your PR. They could ask their own Claude!
So, we're building a version (https://tern.sh), and it's not open source, because we want it to be shareable and hosted and support teams -- all that stuff that makes it work. At the end of the day, I'm not here to maintain my tools. I'm here to use my tools to do the job.
Company that resells openclaw and closed providers preaches about open source.
The new personalization talking point appears to be coordinated. It is all over the Internet since last week.
Problem is, 99.99% of people (including developers) do not need "personalized" software, unless you mean Emacs style.