I Scrolled Through GitHub.
Some people scroll through TikTok. Others through Instagram. Me, I scroll through GitHub, the world's largest open source platform. Looking for interesting projects, ideas with potential.
What always strikes me is the sheer scale of it. Thousands of projects.
Millions of lines of code. GitHub has over 180 million developers, 630 million repositories, and in 2025, over a billion contributions to open source projects.
Some contributors are sponsored, others employed by companies to contribute.
But a huge number of these developers have spent their evenings, their weekends, sometimes years building tools that the entire world uses.
Open source, we tend to take it for granted.
But it’s a pretty unique collective effort. Like Wikipedia.
Strangers giving their time, their expertise, their energy so that others can build on top of it.
But while scrolling, you also come across something else.
Projects that have stalled, been abandoned. Repos where the last commit dates back to 2019. Open issues with no response.
Maintaining an open source project takes constant effort. The code, the documentation, the issues, the pull requests, the updates. It takes time, energy, motivation. Sometimes contributors move on with their lives, find new passions. Sometimes technology moves forward and the project becomes obsolete. Sometimes no one steps up to take over. The reasons vary, but the result is the same: some projects slow down, then stop.
And when that happens, the alternatives that remain are often less accessible.
Some projects change their license because the team can’t keep up on their own anymore. Others slide toward a model where the code stays open but key features end up behind a subscription. Others simply don’t survive technological change: the code ages, and without a strong enough team, the project dies.
And then there are those that hold on. Projects that keep going thanks to a handful of passionate contributors. They’re still standing, and you can support them, notably through GitHub Sponsors.
Not to mention security issues. When a poorly maintained open source project ends up at the heart of critical infrastructure, the consequences can ripple across the world.
That’s when a question came to me: what if AI changed the game?
The biggest problem in open source isn’t a lack of ideas. It’s the cost of maintenance. The human time it takes to keep a project alive. That’s what kills projects. That’s what pushes companies to change their license.
But that cost is collapsing.
With AI, with vibe coding, maintaining a project no longer requires the same investment. Exploring an abandoned codebase, understanding its architecture, fixing bugs, updating dependencies. A developer assisted by AI can do in a week what used to take months.
And in a few years, it might be AI itself maintaining these projects autonomously.
The open source community wouldn’t disappear. It could produce far more than it does today.
Abandoned projects could come back to life. Community forks could be maintained without the superhuman effort it takes today.
We’re not there yet. But the direction is clear.
Maybe it’s optimistic. But it raises the question:
what if the best days of open source aren’t behind us, but ahead?