Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)

Simon Willison's Weblog explores how large language models are reshaping the open-source dream. The traditional promise has been the freedom to examine and modify code, but in practice, most programmers can't justify the time to read and understand unfamiliar code well enough to change it. LLMs are rewriting that equation, Willison says. He now routinely asks Claude to clone repositories from GitHub and explain how they work. What used to require hours—checking out a project, building it, reading the codebase—now takes minutes with AI handling the complexity. Willison isn't yet habitually modifying the software he uses, but he sees a viable path forward that simply didn't exist a year ago.

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