Building open-source tools for the community: still makes sense?

A dialogue in two voices.

Let me be honest up front: over the years I've published a fair few open-source tools — besides PACX, five or six plugins for XrmToolBox, and several other tools/libraries — and this is an article where I try to decide whether it still makes sense for me to keep pouring my time into them.

The doubt crept up on me watching several tools more or less similar to XrmToolBox and PACX proliferate online lately. I don't say that with any bitterness — plenty of them are well made. I say it because it raised a serious question about my own work:

"Now that we have AI, does it still make sense to invest time building and maintaining an open-source tool for the community? Or is the world moving in a direction where everyone stitches together their own tool, and projects like mine are a leftover from an era that's ending?"

I don't have a pre-packaged answer, and I don't want to hand myself a comfortable one. The time I put into this stuff is real time — carved out of sleepless nights and weekends in the mountains — and I want to understand whether I'm spending it well or just clinging to something the world has moved past. To think it through properly, I put the two voices that argue in my head against each other. Let's call them Zeno and Beatrice.