Summary

Open source software emerged as a cooperative survival strategy when engineering talent was scarce — companies shared the metabolic cost of building foundational software because no single firm could afford to duplicate it alone. LLM coding agents have now shattered that scarcity, and the author argues we are shifting back toward competitive, proprietary, and 'private' software development. Drawing on ecology, evolutionary biology, and economic history, the post warns that abandoning the cooperative commons for a million bespoke Kakapo-like projects trades long-term robustness for short-term convenience.

Key Insight

Open source thrived because engineering talent was scarce and cooperation was the only economically viable way to build complex software foundations, but LLM agents are eliminating that scarcity and thereby dissolving the ecological pressure that made the cooperative commons possible.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 8

  Performant animals cannot be robust, and robust animals cannot be performant.

• 8

  Open source was not some act of corporate altruism or charity, it was an adaptive survival mechanism.

• 5

  When resources are scarce, cooperation (not competition) is the only viable strategy.

• 8

  Because coding is no longer scarce, we are abandoning the commons for a million Kakapos. This will only stay possible as long as the tokens keep flowing.

• 7

  Private software is a Kakapo. It will be perfectly fitted to one person's environment. To their machine, their workflow, their company's quirks. There will be little code review, no forks, no other maintainers.

Tone

analytical, cautionary