AI has suddenly become more useful to open-source developers

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ZDNET's key takeaways

Top open-source maintainers find that AI has suddenly become much more useful.

There are still legal and 'AI slop' problems to overcome.

By year's end, AI programming tools should be much more reliable.

With open-source software running pretty much everything, you might think that multiple developers maintain most of the important programs with help from corporate sponsors. You'd be wrong.

As Josh Bressers, VP of security at software supply-chain company Anchore, pointed out last year, the vast majority of open-source projects, 7 million out of 11.8 million programs, have only a single maintainer. You might think that those programs are obscure or no longer used. You'd be wrong about that, too.

Also: 7 AI coding techniques I use to ship real, reliable products - fast

Bressers looked closely at the JavaScript NPM ecosystem and found that, among the projects downloaded over a million times a month, "about half of the 13,000 most downloaded NPM packages are [maintained by] one person."

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