Hacker News·6 min read·hard

Devtools must be open source

B
bryanmikaelian
Devtools must be open source
AI Summary

The author argues that software development tools should be open source to allow engineers to customize their environments effectively. The piece explores how AI agents are lowering the barrier to entry for personalizing software and managing upstream updates.

Five years ago, most software engineers I spoke to had no programs they had written for themselves. (I was asking this question a lot as part of trying to understand how Tailscale could fit into engineers’ lives.) All day, every day, engineers use programs written by others to write programs for others. Many of us customized the programs we used, through config files or plugins or extensions, and many of us used the programs we wrote for others, as users. It was always an unusual treat to ask someone what they had written for themselves and learn about the bespoke software behind their blog, or their home automation, or their homelab, instead of an off-the-shelf, almost-the-right-size static site generator or Zigbee appliance.

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