What I’m seeing: a flood of new repos appearing on GitHub with huge codebases and "extensive" documentation, often produced in two or three commits. The problem is that nobody uses them, nobody reads the docs, and many of these projects don’t provide real value. But the infrastructure cost is real: storing it all, indexing it, scanning it, backing it up, mirroring it....
Licensing is another issue. Licenses protect against copying, but AI changes totally the game: someone can download a repo, ask Claude to analyze and understand it, and then generate a similar solution with no verbatim copying. That’s likely legal... So GPL becomes irrelevant..
If that becomes normal, I can easily imagine companies pulling back from open source. Why publish your best work if anyone can cheaply reimplement it? Code will move back to closed source and become the "secret sauce" again. A black box is harder to vibe-code than an open source repo...