Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)

<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111#49156719">My comment</a> on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111">Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)</a> &mdash; Hacker News.</p><p>One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works.</p> <p>The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being able to lean on <em>other people</em> to do that. Most people can't justify the time commitment needed to read and then modify the code for tools they use very often.</p> <p>I think LLMs have changed that equation in a way that makes the original dream much more feasible.</p> <p>Several times a day I'll prompt regular Claude chat to "Clone x/y from GitHub and tell me how Z works".</p> <p>Getting software to compile in order to start hacking on it used to be enough friction that I often wouldn't bother. Now I treat that as a zero time investment challenge: tell Codex or Claude Code to checkout and build X and then come back ten minutes later and see how it got on.</p> <p>I'm not habitually <em>modifying</em> the software I use yet, but I can see a path to that which didn't exist a year or so ago.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/hacker-news">hacker-news</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/open-source">open-source</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-assisted-programming">ai-assisted-programming</a></p>