> However, LLMs might reduce that effort to zero — we just don't know how developers will look after ten years of using LLMs now.
LLMs might help the new joiner produce code on the level of an average developer faster. But, at the same time, if LLMs are really trained on all open source repositories without any selection, that level might be limited.
It looks like the overwhelming majority of projects on Github, does not really follow stable growth tendencies. In all fairness, as these were the smaller projects, their developers might have never intended to demonstrate best practices, or make the project sustainable on the long-term.
This is all fine, experimentation and learning are very welcome in open source. But, with 83,9% of the projects (in my study) falling into this category, LLM might pick them up as demonstrating overwhelmingly popular best practices.
In the worst case, this might even lead to actual best practices being drowned out, over time.
LLMs might help the new joiner produce code on the level of an average developer faster. But, at the same time, if LLMs are really trained on all open source repositories without any selection, that level might be limited.
I have recently published a potentially related article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44427-025-00019-y
It looks like the overwhelming majority of projects on Github, does not really follow stable growth tendencies. In all fairness, as these were the smaller projects, their developers might have never intended to demonstrate best practices, or make the project sustainable on the long-term.
This is all fine, experimentation and learning are very welcome in open source. But, with 83,9% of the projects (in my study) falling into this category, LLM might pick them up as demonstrating overwhelmingly popular best practices. In the worst case, this might even lead to actual best practices being drowned out, over time.