The fate of "small" open source

Posted November 16, 2025 by Nolan Lawson in software engineering. Tagged: LLMs. 1 Comment

By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util , which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads.

It’s a small collection of utilities for working with Blob s in JavaScript. I wrote it because I found that PouchDB users were endlessly confused about how to work with Blob s and how to convert them to strings, ArrayBuffer s, etc.

Given that some 80% of developers are now using AI in their regular work, blob-util is almost certainly the kind of thing that most developers would just happily have an LLM generate for them. Sure, you could use blob-util , but then you’d be taking on an extra dependency, with unknown performance, maintenance, and supply-chain risks.

And sure enough, Claude will happily spit out whatever Blob utilities you need when prompted:

> Write me a utility function in TypeScript to convert a Blob to an ArrayBuffer. It should return a Promise.

function blobToArrayBuffer(blob: Blob): Promise { return new Promise((resolve, reject) => { const reader = new FileReader(); reader.onload = () => { if (reader.result instanceof ArrayBuffer) { resolve(reader.result); } else { reject(new Error('Failed to read Blob as ArrayBuffer')); } }; reader.onerror = () => { reject(reader.error); }; reader.readAsArrayBuffer(blob); }); }

Claude’s version is pretty close to the blob-util version (unsurprising, since it was probably trained on it!). Although it’s much more verbose, unnecessarily checking if readAsArrayBuffer actually gives you an ArrayBuffer (although this does make TypeScript happy). To be fair, it also improves on my implementation by directly reject ing with an error rather than the more awkward onerror event.

Note: for anyone wondering, yes Claude did suggest the new Blob.arrayBuffer() method, but it also generated the above for “older environments.”

I suppose some people would see this as progress: fewer dependencies, more robust code (even if it’s a bit more verbose), quicker turnaround time than the old “search npm, find a package, read the docs, install it” approach.

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