In the Age of AI, Why Bother Building Open-Source?

PS. It's not been generated via ChatGPT 😉

Why is every startup trying to replace the developer's job? Try to spend 5 minutes in this YouTube shorts and Instagram

reels era and read this blog, and I'm sure by the end of this blog, you'll learn something valuable. So without further

a do, let's get started.

As of now, there're a lot of people who are saying that AI will replace developers (really). And they're trying to sell

this so hard that every major startup has started to believe in this and has started laying off people. But you don't

know the whole truth behind this.

See, every startup wants to make money, whether it's by giving developers a bunch of projects or by removing the staff.

There are only a few startups who actually care about code quality and developer experience in the first place and want

to ship something great to the customer.

How this shift started to happen

When tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude came, they marketed those tools as the holy grail of productivity that could

solve any kind of programming problem in seconds instead of hours or days of debugging. The startups that directly

adopted these tools without proper knowledge saw growth in the beginning, but soon it started to backfire.

The problem with AI tools

The thing is, if you're a junior developer who has just started learning programming or a senior developer who’s

reviewing and coding across multiple codebases at the same time, you might think that AI can help you automate the

boring stuff so that you can focus on business logic. But oftentimes, what really happens is AI generates a lot of code

that you can't properly review(Many developers have not even reviewed or created the PR and now they're reviewing AI

generated code), but you have to approve it because of the deadline or because it happens to work in your scenario. This

will pile up as your codebase grows, and after a certain point, you won’t have any choice other than to accept the

changes suggested by ChatGPT or Gemini.

If you try to look at this from another perspective, whenever you write a piece of code, you'll mostly make mistakes in

the first place while writing it. And by going back and forth on StackOverflow or other websites, you'll learn things

you never intended to learn in the first place. This process was helping developers like you get better and better every

single day because you were not relying on any sort of complete code completion or easy access to LLM tools.

But nowadays, as we're utilizing these LLM tools more and more, the reasoning ability of developers is getting weaker

and weaker day by day which in hindsight, will soon lead to them being directly replaced by AI tools because of their

weakened thinking ability.

What to do now?

Now, the thing is you can't ignore the AI tools because it doesn't matter if it's good or bad, it's still definetly is

something that you can't ignore. So what to do now? The good news is, you can still retain your skills and use the AI

tools at the same time. Because it's never about the tools, it's about how do you adopt or use those tools to make

yourself more productive while still retaining your developer skills.

Let's take an example in order to understand this. Let's say there's a new pagination library in the market and you want

to implement it in your project. Your first approach should be to read the documentation and try to integrate the

library based on it without using any sort of LLM tools. Once you get a good grip on the manual part and you understand

the ins and outs of it, that's when you can start leveraging LLM tools and automating the stuff. By doing this way,

you'll still have to think critically when you're implementing it at the first time, and you'll still be able to

automate it after learning how it works.

One another thing that I would like to mention is that as developers, we shouldn't aim for complete stability in the

world of programming. Because every now and then things are going to change, new libraries and frameworks are going to

arrive and there's no other option other than to learn those stuff. So try to read blogs, books or watch videos related

to your domain and keep applying it in your hobby projects or company's projects. By doing things this way, you'll be

able to level up yourself like never before.

The End

I hope you've now learned mastering on how to learn new things in this AI era 😄 If this blog helped you, then make sure

to share this with your other developers so that they can also learn and benifit from this blog.

Read this if you want to 😄

We were going to kick things off with a story about Meticha, but scratch that this time. This

blog is for you, the developer navigating in a world that changes faster than documentation updates. We’re

building tools and libraries to help you ship

faster, think deeper, and stay focused on what truly matters: solving real problems, not wrestling with LLMs all the

time.

We’ve already released a bunch of open-source tools for Mobile to Web, and we’re just

getting started 😄 Our mission is simple: build things that makes your dev life smoother, sharper, and more impactful.

And our goal? To meet you wherever you code so that we can help you move faster without losing your edge.