A world that runs on increasingly powerful AI coding tools is one where software creation is cheap — or so the thinking goes — leaving little room for traditional software companies. As one analyst report put it, “vibe coding will allow startups to replicate the features of complex SaaS platforms.”

Cue the hand-wringing and declarations that software companies are doomed.

Open-source software projects that use agents to paper over long-standing resource constraints should logically be among the first to benefit from the era of cheap code. But that equation just doesn’t quite stick. In practice, the impact of AI coding tools on open source software has been far more mixed.

AI coding tools have caused as many problems as they have solved, according to industry experts. The easy-to-use and accessible nature of AI coding tools has enabled a flood of bad code that threatens to overwhelm projects. Building new features is easier than ever, but maintaining them is just as hard and threatens to further fragment software ecosystems.

The result is a more complicated story than simple software abundance. Perhaps, the predicted, imminent death of the software engineer in this new AI era is premature.

Quality vs quantity

Across the board, projects with open codebases are noticing a decline in the average quality of submissions, likely a result of AI tools lowering barriers to entry.

“For people who are junior to the VLC codebase, the quality of the merge requests we see is abysmal,” Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the CEO of the VideoLan Organization that oversees VLC, said in a recent interview.

Kempf is still optimistic about AI coding tools overall but says they’re best “for experienced developers.” 

There have been similar problems at Blender, a 3D modeling tool that has been maintained as open source since 2002. Blender Foundation CEO Franceso Siddi said LLM-assisted contributions typically “wasted reviewers’ time and affected their motivation.” Blender is still developing an official policy for AI coding tools, but Siddi said they are “neither mandated nor recommended for contributors or core developers.”

The flood of merge requests has gotten so bad that open-source developers are building new tools to manage it.

Earlier this month, developer Mitchell Hashimoto launched a system that would limit GitHub contributions to “vouched” users, effectively closing the open-door policy for open-source software. As Hashimoto put it in the announcement, “AI eliminated the natural barrier to entry that let OSS projects trust by default.”

The same effect has emerged in bug bounty programs, which give outside researchers an open door to report security vulnerabilities. The open-source data transfer program cURL recently halted its bug bounty program after being overwhelmed by what creator Daniel Stenberg described as “AI slop.”

“In the old days, someone actually invested a lot of time [in] the security report,” Stenberg said at a recent conference. “There was a built-in friction, but now there’s no effort at all in doing this. The floodgates are open.”

It’s particularly frustrating because many of open-source projects are also seeing the benefits of AI coding tools. Kempf says it’s made building new modules for VLC far easier, provided there’s an experienced developer at the helm.

“You can give the model the whole codebase of VLC and say, ‘I’m porting this to a new operating system,’” Kempf said. “It is useful for senior people to write new code, but it’s difficult to manage for people who don’t know what they’re doing.”

Competing priorities

The bigger problem for open-source projects is a difference in priorities. Companies like Meta value new code and products, while open-source software work focuses more on stability.

“The problem is different from large companies to open-source projects,” Kempf commented. “They get promoted for writing code, not maintaining it.”

AI coding tools are also arriving at a moment when software, in general, is particularly fragmented.

Open Source Index founder Konstantin Vinogradov, who recently launched an endowment to maintain open-source infrastructure, said AI tools are running into a long-standing trend in open-source engineering.

“On the one hand, we have exponentially growing code base with exponentially growing number of interdependences, And on the other hand, we have number of active maintainers, which is maybe slowly growing, but definitely not keeping up,” Vinogradov said. “With AI, both parts of this equation accelerated.”

It’s a new way of thinking about AI’s impact on software engineering — one with alarming implications for the industry at large.

If you see engineering as the process of producing working software, AI coding makes it easier than ever. But if engineering is really the process of managing software complexity, AI coding tools could make it harder. At the very least, it will take a lot of active planning and work to keep the sprawling complexity in check.

For Vinogradov, the result is a familiar situation for open-source projects: a lot of work to do, and not enough good engineers to do it.

“AI does not increase the number of active, skilled maintainers,” he remarked. “It empowers the good ones, but all the fundamental problems just remain.”

Apple is reportedly developing a trio of AI-powered wearables, including smart glasses, camera-equipped AirPods and a new AI pin device.

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the products are designed to give Siri more “contextual awareness” by letting it see and interpret the world around you.

The headline device appears to be a pair of Apple-designed smart glasses aimed squarely at competitors like Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration. Rather than partnering with an established eyewear brand, Apple is said to be developing its frames in-house.

• Apple Music is rolling out five new features in iOS 24.6, including the new Playlist Playground and Concerts Near You functions
• It’s also getting a new UI design for albums and playlists
• Despite its new look, it’s divided users who have called out Apple for its lack of accessibility features

Apple will unveil its next slew of new products in a couple of weeks at its March 4 event, but it’s already teasing some of the new upgrades coming to Apple Music in iOS 24.6 — and there’s no doubt they’ll breathe new life into one of the best music streaming services.

If you’re enrolled in the iOS 24.6 beta, there’s a chance you’ve already caught a glimpse of the new Apple Music features that are expected to roll out widely in the coming weeks. Unlike Spotify, it’s not in Apple Music’s character to churn out one new feature after the next, so the fact that it’s bringing five new upgrades at once is big news.

Are you ready to feel old? Lemmings just turned thirty-five. The famous puzzle game first came out in February of 1991 for the Commodore Amiga, before eventually being ported to just about everything else out there, from the ZX Spectrum to the FM Towns, and other systems so obscure they don’t have the class to start with two letters, like Macintosh and DOS. [RobSmithDev] decided he needed to commemorate the anniversary with a real floating lemming.

The umbrella-equipped lemming is certainly an iconic aspect of the game franchise, so it’s a good pick for a diorama. Some people would have just bought a figurine and hung it with some string, but that’s not going to get your project on Hackaday. [Rob] designed and 3D printed the whole tableau himself, and designed magnetic levitation system with some lemmings-themed effects.

The mag-lev is of the top-down type, where a magnet in the top of the umbrella is pulled against gravity by an electromagnetic coil. There are kits for this sort of thing, but they didn’t quite work for [Rob] so he rolled his own with an Arduino Nano. That allowed him to include luxuries you don’t always get from AliExpress like a thermal sensors.

Our favorite part of the build, though, has to be the sound effects. When the hall effect sensor detects the lemming statue — or, rather, the magnet in its umbrella — it plays the iconic “Let’s Go!” followed by the game’s sound track. If the figurine falls, or when you remove it, you get the “splat” sound, and if the lemming hits the magnet, it screams. [Rob] posted a demo video if you just want to see it in action, but there’s also a full build video that we’ve embedded below.

A commemorative mag-lev seems to be a theme for [Rob] — we featured his 40th anniversary Amiga lamp last year, but that’s hardly all he gets up to. We have also seen functional replicas, this one of a motion tracker from Aliens, and retrotech deep-dives like when he analyzed the magical-seeming tri-format floppy disk.

If you’re an iPhone user who likes to keep tabs on where your stuff is, you can’t go far wrong with an AirTag. The second-gen model that Apple just released outpaces the original in every way (aside from the galling lack of a keyring hole, that is). While it’s easy enough to replace the battery in both versions of the AirTag, you might not want to have to worry about the device’s battery life for a very long time. Enter Elevation Lab’s extended battery case for the AirTag, which is currently on sale at Amazon for $16.

The case usually sells for $23, so that’s a 30 percent discount. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this deal, but it’s a pretty decent one all the same.

Elevation Lab

Elevation Lab says its AirTag case can extend the battery life of the tracking device to 10 years, and now it’s on sale.

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This is arguably one of the more useful AirTag accessories around for certain use cases. It won’t exactly be helpful for an AirTag that you put in a wallet or attach to your keys, as it’s too bulky for such a purpose — and it doesn’t have a hole for a keyring anyway. Still, if you’re looking for an AirTag case that you can place in a suitcase or backpack and not have to touch for years, this could be the ticket.

Elevation Lab says that, when you place a couple of AA batteries in the case, it can extend the tracker’s battery life to as much as 10 years (the brand recommends using Energizer Ultimate Lithium batteries for best results). The AirTag is slated to run for over a year on its standard CR2032 button cell.

The case gives the AirTag more protection as well. It’s sealed with four screws and it has a IP69 waterproof rating. What’s more, it doesn’t ostensibly look like an AirTag case, so someone who steals an item with one inside is perhaps less likely to realize that the object they pilfered is being tracked.

There are some other downsides, though. Since the AirTag is locked inside a case, the sound it emits will be muffled. Elevation Lab says the device’s volume will be about two-thirds the level of a case-free AirTag. However, the second-gen AirTag is louder than its predecessor, which should mitigate that issue somewhat.

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from the great-job,-buddy dept

Yesterday we noted how CBS fecklessly tried to prevent Stephen Colbert from broadcasting an interview with Texas Democratic State Representative James Talarico. Which, as you’ve probably already seen, resulted in the interview on YouTube getting way more viewers than it would have normally, and Texas voters flocking to Google to figure out who Talarico is:

In short, Brendan Carr’s continual threats and unconstitutional distortion of the FCC’s “equal opportunity” rule (also known as the “equal time” rule) resulted in a candidate getting exponentially more attention than they ever would have if Brendan Carr wasn’t such a weird, censorial zealot.

If only there was a name for this sort of phenomenon?

Despite a lot of speculation to the contrary, there’s no evidence the GOP specifically targeted Talarico in any coherent, strategic sense. This entire thing appears to have occurred because CBS lawyers — focused on numerous regulatory issues before the Trump administration, didn’t want to offend the extremist authoritarian censors at Trump’s FCC. It’s always about the money.

CBS (and ABC, NBC, and Fox) have been lobbying the FCC for years to get ride of rules preventing them from merging. CBS (read: Larry Ellison) has managed to get his friend Trump conducting a fake DOJ antitrust inquiry into Netflix’s planned acquisition of Warner Brothers, so they can then turn around and buy Warner (and CNN) instead. They’ll need to remain close with the administration for that to work out.

CBS tried to do damage control and claim they never directly threatened Colbert, but you can tell by the way they’re being a little dodgy about ownership of those claims (demanding no direct attribution to a specific person “on background”) they likely aren’t true:

Colbert’s response to the claim he wasn’t threatened was… diplomatic:

Amusingly some of the news outlets covering this story (like Variety here) couldn’t be bothered to even mention that CBS has numerous regulatory issues before the Trump FCC, which is why they folded like a pile of rain-soaked street corner cardboard at the slightest pressure from the Trump FCC.

As we’ve noted repeatedly, Brendan Carr has absolutely no legal legs to stand on here. His abuse of the equal opportunity rule is equal parts unconstitutional and incoherent. CBS (and any other network with bottomless legal budgets) could easily win in court (I wager they could even get many lawyers to defend them pro bono), but Ellison (and his nepo baby son) have a much bigger ideological mission in mind.

Filed Under: brendan carr, censorship, equal opportunity, equal time, fcc, first amendment, james talarico, stephen colbert, streisand effect

Companies: cbs

Plato, a Berlin-based startup, has raised $14.5 million in seed funding to bring generative AI into wholesale distribution, a massive industry that rarely makes tech headlines but quietly moves a significant share of the world’s goods.

The round was led by Atomico, with Cherry Ventures, Discovery Ventures, and D11Z joining in.

Wholesale distribution accounts for roughly one-fifth of global production flows. Yet much of it still runs on aging ERP systems, Excel spreadsheets, and manual quoting workflows that haven’t meaningfully evolved in years.

While AI has flooded marketing, customer support, and coding, distribution sales teams are often still copy-pasting numbers between systems.

Plato’s thesis is simple: instead of adding another dashboard, embed AI directly into the operational core. The company connects to existing ERP systems and turns historical sales data into automated actions, flagging revenue opportunities, generating quotes, and identifying risks before they surface in quarterly reports.

The idea grew out of lived frustration. Co-founder Benedikt Nolte experienced the inefficiencies firsthand in his family’s distribution business. Generic CRM tools, he concluded, weren’t designed for the complexity of distributor operations. Plato was built specifically for that environment, not retrofitted from SaaS templates designed for startups.

Early traction suggests the industry is paying attention. Plato reportedly works with several large distributors on six-figure contracts, a sign that AI adoption in traditional sectors is less about hype and more about whether it can save time and unlock revenue.

The fresh capital will help Plato expand beyond sales intelligence into areas like procurement and customer service automation, while pushing into new European markets and eventually the U.S.

More broadly, the round highlights a shift in AI investing. The next wave isn’t just about bigger language models; it’s about embedding intelligence into industries that haven’t been rewritten by software yet. Wholesale distribution may not be glamorous, but it is structurally essential. If AI can modernize that layer of the economy, the impact will be far larger than another chatbot demo.