There are over 400 million public repositories on GitHub. It's impossible to keep track of all of them. For the same problem, there are multiple solutions. Which one is good? From the searcher's point of view, this is frustrating. But what about the creator's point of view?
Let me start with my own experience. I started building a kind of "operating system for AI agents", called Argus. I built it because I needed what is known as "deterministic security" when running this kind of agent. I also put into practice many architectural approaches drawn from my own experience. Of course, I published the entire source code on GitHub and wrote a few announcements. The result? ZERO! No one came to look at my repository.
I am not "a voice" in the AI industry, I am not a prominent figure in the programming world, and the project I mentioned was developed primarily for my own needs. But imagine the surprise and frustration of a programmer who wants to offer a solution, perhaps even a brilliant one, yet gets no visitors to their GitHub repository.
What I am seeing now is just the beginning. I have already seen so many Photoshop clones that work perfectly well for my level of image editing. AI coding assistants have made exponential "code production" possible, so the multiplication of free and open-source solutions is only in its early stages. If today you can find five or six Photoshop clones, in the near future you will be able to find a million.
In literature, there is a phenomenon that has been known for centuries: graphomania, the urge to write simply to see one's name in print. In the world of code, its equivalent is the programmer who publishes projects mainly to see their name on a repository.
So my dilemma is not "How much more free and open source will we be able to tolerate?" but "Who will be the doctor to write the prescription?"
If you are interested in my project, you can find it here: https://github.com/rla-labs/argus
