AI is destroying open source, and it's not even good yet

The proliferation of "AI slop"—low-quality, machine-generated code and content—is actively degrading the open-source ecosystem and professional journalism. Recent incidents, such as Ars Technica retracting an article due to hallucinated AI quotes and the *curl* project abandoning bug bounties after a surge in fraudulent AI-generated vulnerability reports, highlight a growing burden on human maintainers. While local LLMs offer utility for specific tasks when guided by expertise, the current "agentic AI" trend encourages entitled, low-effort contributions that force platforms like GitHub to offer features that restrict collaboration. This surge in resource consumption, which has already triggered a global shortage of high-capacity hard drives, mirrors the speculative behavior of the crypto and NFT booms. Ultimately, the plateau in AI reasoning capabilities, coupled with the exhaustion of human reviewers, suggests that the current AI trajectory is a bubble that threatens the fundamental collaborative structures of the internet.