Software Creation Needs Cooperation, Not Generation

LLMs make code generation easy and cheap, especially if the code already exists in some form. I can spin up a new bare-bones charting library, static site generator, or C compiler (apparently) as soon as the existing versions don’t suit my needs. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. One reason to be excited about Open Source software is that we can use it to come together to solve a problem once-and-for-all and stop re-inventing. I’m worried that people are out there recreating seventeen versions of everything that already exists, which is sheer waste. This is not progress. What I wish for is more cooperation (people refining existing software together) not more generation (people going off on their own and creating more fragmentation). What we need more than tools for code generation is tools for code cooperation at a large scale.