SerenityOS Creator Maps Open Source's Five Stages of Grief Over AI Code
vivekhaldar · x · 2026-10-02
Andreas Kling, creator of SerenityOS, frames the open source community's reaction to AI-generated code as the five stages of grief:
- Denial: AI code is slop; nothing will change.
- Anger: AI slop PRs are ruining GitHub; ban AI-generated code.
- Bargaining: AI can code, but only with human review of every line, or adversarial AI review for intake safety.
- Depression: If code generation is nearly free, what is a contribution? Is GitHub-style open source culture going away?
- Acceptance: Good issues, test cases, benchmarks, specs, and ideas become the scarce inputs; upstreams may stop accepting arbitrary code while forking gets much easier.
He adds a bonus stage, "Reconstruction," suggesting communities will find new ways to persist under an evolving contribution model.
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