The Impending AI Failure Cascade

What Happens When The Real Developers Disappear?

Software development is an ecosystem comprising those who build and those who consume. What happens when the builders start to disappear?

In the days before open source software, the software development scene was quite straightforward. Companies had two main options for sourcing the underlying tooling to deliver a solution: they could either buy a commercial library licence or hire experienced developers to create custom tooling. This was a time of high demand for skilled developers, with a significant barrier to entry, and work that was both mentally challenging and financially rewarding.

The Open Source Revolution

The emergence of open source software changed this landscape dramatically. Developers no longer needed to maintain a vast toolkit of computer science knowledge. Instead, they could leverage open source libraries to handle the heavy lifting, allowing them to focus almost exclusively on solving business problems. Many of those open source solutions were effectively free of charge. This shift democratised software development, but it also created a new ecosystem that would become crucial to the industry’s future.

The open source community thrives on motivated developers who contribute for various reasons. For many, it’s a career accelerator - a way to demonstrate abilities, develop skills, and drive interview conversations. It’s also a powerful platform for showcasing collaboration skills and organisational compliance. Most importantly, it’s all out in the open, visible for anyone to see and evaluate.

This visibility has led to an explosion of open source projects. Almost every library started with a simple problem and solution, evolving into a reusable library as interested parties got involved. The community’s strength lies in this organic growth - developers solving real problems and sharing their solutions with others.

This ecosystem is responsible for almost everything. From the niche office automation tooling created by a disparate community of developers who want to solve one specific problem, right up to the creators of languages, compilers, editors, and core infrastructure.

The Ecosystem’s Balance

The open source ecosystem traditionally balances two primary stakeholders: the contributors and the consumers. While we’ve explored the motivations of contributors, the consumers - particularly for-profit corporations - play an equally crucial role. These companies rely heavily on open source software to make their systems development financially viable. Without open source, many companies would struggle to fund the internal skills they’d need to get things done. And in turn, by being potential employers, they contribute to the motivation for developers to get involved. We all depend on the open source communities, even those of us who primarily produce closed source proprietary solutions.

The New Players in Town

But there are new players in this ecosystem: the AI coding agent vendor and their “vibe coding” users. These new stakeholders bring a concerning mentality to software development. They view software development as something that can be automated and commoditised, claiming that AI agents will soon replace developers entirely. Their focus is purely on profit, with little regard for the software development ecosystem that makes the vendors tools viable, and the “vibe coders” dreams feasible.

It’s one thing to expect an AI agent to glue together a few libraries that represent thousands of hours of work comprising the opinions and experience of an army of smart minds. It’s an entirely different proposition to expect an AI agent to reproduce that work at an acceptable level of proven quality.

The Consequences

So what happens if the AI agent vendors and users get their “developer-less vibe coding” utopia? The consequences could be severe. The demand for software developers would begin to disappear, taking with it the motivation that drives the open source community. Many open source projects would die from neglect, and we would face a generational¹ loss of skill that might never recover.

Consider these critical questions: How useful would an AI agent be if it couldn’t pull in human-created open source libraries to do the real work? How many people drawn to the “vibe coding” or “prompt-driven development” cycle would be motivated to take over open source software maintenance?

Remember, these are people who were drawn to AI agents because of the simplicity and speed, not because of the underlying technical outcomes. I foresee a desert of creativity, where the motivated minds who once contributed to open source software seek their satisfaction - and income - in other industries. A sad but inevitable outcome of the destruction of the software development discipline.

Two Possible Futures

Assuming that AI agents are going to remain, there are two possible outcomes as I see it: a failure cascade and a total takeover.

The failure cascade is simple: with fewer developers, open source will cease to be a viable source of tooling. The loss of human-created tooling will lead to a failure of AI agents. The industry will have to reboot, having lost a generation of developers.

The total takeover is more concerning. In this scenario, the AI agent vendors progressively fill the gap created by the collapse of open source software. They produce the libraries themselves, employing humans to produce them, and then charge licence fees for their use via their own products. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the AI agent vendors would open source their work. Why would anybody open source a toolset if the only other consumers are their competitors?

In Closing

The software ecosystem has always relied on a delicate balance between those who build and those who consume. As AI agents edge closer to the centre of development, we risk losing not just the builders, but the motivation and community that have driven open source forward. If we allow the skills and spirit of real developers to fade, we may find ourselves in a world where innovation stalls and the tools we depend on are no longer freely shared, but locked away behind paywalls. The future of software depends on the choices we make now. Do we nurture the ecosystem, or watch it unravel?

Generational Loss

As I see it, a developer generation is created over a 5 year period, very often as young people gain unfettered access to computing. A generational loss would take 5-10 years at most. ↩