Open-source communities and disappearing friction

Open-source communities grew from the outside in for decades. Due to friction. People with questions appeared on forums, IRC or in an issue tracker. And gradually moved to more inner circles of the community.

The advent of LLM’s changed this, and Mara Averick eloquently describes how AI is absorbing the visible friction that open-source communities have always relied on to see - and welcome - newcomers:

The playbook for building and sustaining open-source communities—accumulated over decades by a lot of people who took the question seriously—assumed newcomers would keep becoming visible on their own. Nobody wrote that assumption down, because nobody had to. Now that it’s failing, the playbook has to change.

You could say that open-source projects are in some way inherently LLM-friendly:

• source code is publicly available
• active projects often have extensive public documentation

Justin Duke, Buttondown’s founder, noted something similar when writing about the growth Buttondown is seeing from LLM’s. He is looking into how he can increase friction for new users so the support load will not overwhelm the team. Open-source projects may need to definte new ways of imposing friction, too?