Where Does That Leave Us? Developers, Authority, and Sharing in the Age of AI
In 2014, if you were an ambitious developer trying to make a name for yourself, you built in the open. You wrote code publicly, you blogged your thought process, you spoke at meetups, and you shared your ideas freely. That was the culture: openness as a path to credibility. If you wanted to be seen as someone worth following, you showed your work.
Companies, of course, kept their proprietary code locked away. But individuals? We thrived on transparency. Open source wasn’t just a license model — it was a social contract. You shared, others learned, and your reputation grew.
Fast‑forward to the post‑AI era, and that contract feels… broken.
Today, any detailed idea, architecture, or thought process you publish can be copied, pasted into an LLM, and instantly transformed into a polished product, a startup pitch, or a monetizable asset. Your hard‑won insight becomes someone else’s “prompt engineering.” Your originality becomes raw material.
