Good question. Why hasn't there been a profusion of new game-changing software, fixes to long-standing issues in open-source software, any nontrivial shipped product at all? Heck, why isn't there a cornucopia of new apps, even trivial ones? Where is all the shovelware [0]? Previous HN discussion here [1].
Don't get me wrong, AI is at least as game-changing for programming as StackOverflow and Google were back in the day. I use it every day, and it's saved me hours of work for certain specific tasks [2]. But it's simply not a massive 10x force multiplier that some might lead you to believe.
I'll start believing when maintainers of complex, actively developed, and widely used open-source projects (e.g. ffmpeg, curl, openssh, sqlite) start raving about a massive uptick in positive contributions, pointing to a concrete influx of high-quality AI-assisted commits.
[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
The effect of these tools is people losing their software jobs (down 35% since 2020). Unemployed devs aren’t clamoring to go use AI on OSS.
Context: This news story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533