Open Source Superpowers in the Agentic Era
After forty-plus years in software, I hold one belief with near-total confidence: documentation drifts, source code doesn't. A doc describes what somebody believed at some point in the past; the code describes what the machine will actually do tonight. For most of my career that gap was simply a fact of life, because reading someone else's codebase deeply enough to find the truth was expensive — days or weeks of a senior engineer's full attention.
Agentic software development — AI coding agents doing real engineering work under human direction — has just changed that economics. And it hands open source two superpowers it didn't have before:
a) Agents can go to the real source to find the truth — and accumulate skills along the way — instead of relying on docs or memory that may be stale.
b) When a fix is needed, the path to landing it is now very short: open an issue or a PR against the real repo, or fork and fix.
That's the thesis. Rather than argue it abstractly, let me walk you through a scenario.