2026-02-06 00:47:04
According to a new study from a team of researchers in Europe, vibe coding is killing open-source software (OSS) and it’s happening faster than anyone predicted.
Thanks to vibe coding, a colloquialism for the practice of quickly writing code with the assistance of an LLM, anyone with a small amount of technical knowledge can churn out computer code and deploy software, even if they don't fully review or understand all the code they churn out. But there’s a hidden cost. Vibe coding relies on vast amounts of open-source software, a trove of libraries, databases, and user knowledge that’s been built up over decades.
Open-source projects rely on community support to survive. They’re collaborative projects where the people who use them give back, either in time, money, or knowledge, to help maintain the projects. Humans have to come in and fix bugs and maintain libraries.
Vibe coders, according to these researchers, don’t give back.
The study Vibe Coding Kills Open Source, takes an economic view of the problem and asks the question: is vibe coding economically sustainable? Can OSS survive when so many of its users are takers and not givers? According to the study, no.
“Our main result is that under traditional OSS business models, where maintainers primarily monetize direct user engagement…higher adoption of vibe coding reduces OSS provision and lowers welfare,” the study said. “In the long-run equilibrium, mediated usage erodes the revenue base that sustains OSS, raises the quality threshold for sharing, and reduces the mass of shared packages…the decline can be rapid because the same magnification mechanism that amplifies positive shocks to software demand also amplifies negative shocks to monetizable engagement. In other words, feedback loops that once accelerated growth now accelerate contraction.”
This is already happening. Last month, Tailwind Labs—the company behind an open source CSS framework that helps people build websites—laid off three of its four engineers. Tailwind Labs is extremely popular, more popular than it’s ever been, but revenue has plunged.
Tailwind Labss head Adam Wathan explained why in a post on GitHub. “Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever,” he said. “The docs are the only way people find out about our commercial products, and without customers we can't afford to maintain the framework. I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday), but I can't prioritize it right now unfortunately, and I'm nervous to offer them without solving that problem first.”
Miklós Koren, a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and one of the authors of the vibe coding study, told 404 Media that he and his colleagues had just finished the first draft of the study the day before Wathan posted his frustration. “Our results suggest that Tailwind's case will be the rule, not the exception,” he said.
According to Koren, vibe-coders simply don’t give back to the OSS communities they’re taking from. “The convenience of delegating your work to the AI agent is too strong. There are some superstar projects like Openclaw that generate a lot of community interest but I suspect the majority of vibe coders do not keep OSS developers in their minds,” he said. “I am guilty of this myself. Initially I limited my vibe coding to languages I can read if not write, like TypeScript. But for my personal projects I also vibe code in Go, and I don't even know what its package manager is called, let alone be familiar with its libraries.”
The study said that vibe coding is reducing the cost of software development, but that there are other costs people aren’t considering. “The interaction with human users is collapsing faster than development costs are falling,” Koren told 404 Media. “The key insight is that vibe coding is very easy to adopt. Even for a small increase in capability, a lot of people would switch. And recent coding models are very capable. AI companies have also begun targeting business users and other knowledge workers, which further eats into the potential ‘deep-pocket’ user base of OSS.”
This won’t end well. “Vibe coding is not sustainable without open source,” Koren said. “You cannot just freeze the current state of OSS and live off of that. Projects need to be maintained, bugs fixed, security vulnerabilities patched. If OSS collapses, vibe coding will go down with it. I think we have to speak up and act now to stop that from happening.”
He said that major AI firms like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t continue to free ride on OSS or the whole system will collapse. “We propose a revenue sharing model based on actual usage data,” he said. “The details would have to be worked out, but the technology is there to make such a business model feasible for OSS.”
AI is the ultimate rent seeker, a middle-man that inserts itself between a creator and a user and it often consumes the very thing that’s giving it life. The OSS/vibe-coding dynamic is playing out in other places. In October, Wikipedia said it had seen an explosion in traffic but that most of it was from AI scraping the site. Users who experience Wikipedia through an AI intermediary don’t update the site and don’t donate during its frequent fund-raising drives.
The same thing is happening with OSS. Vibe coding agents don’t read the advertisements in documentation about paid products, they don’t contribute to the knowledge base of the software, and they don’t donate to the people who maintain the software.
“Popular libraries will keep finding sponsors,” Koren said. “Smaller, niche projects are more likely to suffer. But many currently successful projects, like Linux, git, TeX, or grep, started out with one person trying to scratch their own itch. If the maintainers of small projects give up, who will produce the next Linux?”
2026-02-06 00:37:23
In 2015, after reading a book about how the telegraph created a sort of proto-internet that helped make various robber barons rich and powerful, I wrote an article about Elon Musk that, a decade later, feels both very embarrassing and somewhat prophetic. Musk and SpaceX had just announced a plan to launch a constellation of low-earth orbit, internet-providing satellites.
I saw this at the time as a step toward a kind of everything company. SpaceX was working on reusable rockets that would drastically lower the cost of flying things to space, and I imagined at the time that, if successful, being able to fly things to space for a far lower cost than his competitors would give Musk incredible power and wealth. This was in part because of SpaceX’s potential ability to become a telecom company in addition to a space launch company.
“If he can successfully develop the reusable launch vehicles, that gives him a tremendous dominance over the mode of getting to space. Once you can do it relatively cheaply and in high volume, instead of launching five or six times a year, you’re launching [and] putting stuff into orbit once a week. That’s the hard part,” Marco Caceres, a space industry analyst, told me at the time. “All the other stuff is really dessert, in a way. It’s the satellites, the services that’ll make you the real money.” SpaceX said at the time that Starlink would have 4,000 satellites. Today, it has more than 9,000 satellites, and the majority of all satellites in space have been launched by SpaceX and are owned by SpaceX.
I imagined a world in which SpaceX essentially became a telecom company in addition to being a space company, and the type of power that would give Musk. A decade later, at least this part is more or less coming to pass. SpaceX is a company that has been extremely boosted by tax breaks, subsidies, and government contracts. It also has become critical, quasi-governmental infrastructure not just for the United States but for companies around the world. And Starlink itself now essentially has a monopoly on fast internet access in rural areas, on boats, in conflict areas, and, increasingly, on airplanes. Starlink is very much a real thing—an international flight I was on recently had free Starlink internet and it felt like half of the plane spent most of the flight on video calls.
My article from 2015 is full of Musk boosterism that makes me embarrassed now, and Musk promises things every five minutes that are either wildly overhyped by the media, never happen, or happen on much longer timescales than expected. But the article was directionally accurate: SpaceX figured out how to launch rockets routinely and inexpensively, and it is now wildly powerful because of this. Starlink exists because it is easy for SpaceX to put satellites in space, and Musk’s unfettered access to low-Earth orbit has allowed him to literally dominate a space (sorry) that should be shared by all of humanity.
SpaceX has always been a political project, one in which Musk seeks to colonize space, expand his bloodline, and/or become god emperor of the universe. It is perhaps his most political project. And yet, of his companies, it has flown under the radar as an explicitly political project because Musk has been so goddamned annoying, destructive, and fascistic on X and within the federal government. SpaceX, meanwhile, has always been the most competently run of his companies, and is one that under Gwynne Shotwell’s leadership had, til now, largely not been fucked with by Musk in the ways that Tesla, Twitter, and xAI have been.
That’s not to say Musk hasn’t meddled at all: He ordered the shutdown of Starlink in Ukraine in the early days of Russia’s war there, and literally this week the company announced he would crack down on Russia’s use of Starlink for drones. That this company and this man have this power at all highlights my point: Starlink, and SpaceX, have become geopolitically important in ways that most people have not thought about, that we have not grappled with, and that the Trump administration is almost definitely not going to do anything about.
And so it feels both important and quite alarming that SpaceX is acquiring xAI in what appears to be a highly complex financial scheme that I cannot even begin to pretend to understand. Musk’s announcement of this deal, which appears to have been the result of a protracted “negotiation” between himself, is batshit crazy, first of all: “SpaceX has acquired xAI to form the most ambitious, vertically-integrated innovation engine on (and off) Earth, with AI, rockets, space-based internet, direct-to-mobile device communications and the world’s foremost real-time information and free speech platform. This marks not just the next chapter, but the next book in SpaceX and xAI's mission: scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars!”
Musk goes on to say that SpaceX and xAI will launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers,” and signs off “thank you for everything you have done and will do for the light cone of consciousness.”
There are many reasons that “AI data centers in space” may be a pipe dream and may not happen, but what he is proposing is a magnitude of space junk that no other company could plausibly promise to launch. Data centers or not, SpaceX is now dominating low-Earth orbit in a way no other company or country has. While Musk has been gutting the federal government, interfering in elections, allowing people to generate CSAM, engaging in white supremacy, planning trips to Epstein’s island, implanting chips into people’s brains, siphoning off taxpayer money to build ridiculous tunnels, giving his sperm to whoever will take it, turning his cars into experimental robot taxis, and pretending to build humanoid robots, SpaceX has somewhat (?) quietly colonized and dominated low earth orbit.
Musk has taken this space for his own use, concerns about light pollution, satellite collisions, and telecom monopolies be damned. This has always been concerning, but explicitly intertwining the aspirations and fate of SpaceX with Musk’s CSAM generating social media website, his AI bullshit machines, and his right wing political project is horrifying and monopolistic. What happens next, I have no idea.
2026-02-05 23:36:40
A new tool searches your LinkedIn connections for people who are mentioned in the Epstein files, just in case you don’t, understandably, want anything to do with them on the already deranged social network.
404 Media tested the tool, called EpsteIn—as in, a mash up of Epstein and LinkedIn—and it appears to work.
“I found myself wondering whether anyone had mapped Epstein's network in the style of LinkedIn—how many people are 1st/2nd/3rd degree connections of Jeffrey Epstein?” Christopher Finke, the creator of the tool, told 404 Media in an email. “Smarter programmers than me have already built tools to visualize that, but I couldn't find anything that would show the overlap between my network and his.”
“Thankfully the overlap is zero, but I did find that a previous co-worker who I purposefully chose not to keep in touch with appears in the files, and not in an incidental way. Trusting my gut on him paid off, I suppose,” he added.
Finke said the tool is based on the work of Patrick Duggan, who made an API to easily search the files.
“Search the publicly released Epstein court documents for mentions of your LinkedIn connections,” the GitHub repository for the tool reads.
The tool can output a report that shows each result’s name, company, and their position; the total number of mentions across all the searched documents; excerpts from each matching document, and links to the original material on the Department of Justice’s website.
In my case, the tool found 22 connections with mentions in the Epstein files. But, many of these are likely false positives. Some of them were very common names. The tool also found 5 hits for “Adam S.” Obviously, there could be a lot of people with that name and initial. The repository acknowledges this: “Common names may produce false positives—review the context excerpts to verify relevance.”
Last week the DOJ published 3.5 million pages of files related to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The massive dump also contained videos, images, and audio recordings. 404 Media found it included multiple unredacted photos of fully nude women or girls, with the DOJ only taking them down days after their upload. We also covered Musk’s inclusion in the files.
The dump contains a wealth of other tech elites, WIRED reported. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and many others all make an appearance.
But a mention does not necessarily mean those people were up to anything nefarious (although many, many were, obviously). Jeff Moss, the founder of the DEF CON hacking conference, is mentioned in the files because Vincenzo Iozzo, a well-known hacker, offered to introduce Epstein to the DEF CON founder.
On Reddit, Moss wrote, “Vincenzo approached me for free badges and I said no, and pointed him to the Epstein Wikipedia page and tried to warn him to stay away from any involvement. I didn’t realize how deep it went. As far as I know Epstein never attended. All this other behind the scenes stuff is wild, but not surprising.”
Moss’s LinkedIn post is also where 404 Media first saw the EpsteIN tool.
Update: this piece has been updated to include information from the tool's creator.
2026-02-05 23:05:56
When I was home over Christmas, I was digging through some of my dad’s baseball memorabilia when I came across a copy of the Washington Post from March 7, 1999: “Printing Revolution Spurs New Look,” the lead headline read. The paper was such an incredible artifact that I took photos of each of its pages.
The paper was a “special edition” printed to commemorate the opening of its College Park, Maryland printing press, where my dad worked for years. This special edition was presumably one of the first papers that came off those presses. It was an almost unimaginably optimistic time for the journalism business: “Newspapers are flying off the Washington Post’s new presses—four in its Springfield plant and four more in a new building in College Park,” the article read. “These papers are different from those printed even several weeks ago. They showcase state-of-the-art advances in the industry and culminate a printing revolution that began in the 15th century on Johann Gutenberg’s moveable type.” In a photo, the publisher of The Post, Donald Graham, posed with a stack of “some of the first color papers at College Park.”
An info box called “Things to Know” explained that The Post printed 800,000 copies on weekdays and 1.1 million copies on Sundays. In a letter from the publisher titled “Changes Benefiting Readers, Advertisers,” Graham wrote that the new printing plant was “the newspaper’s biggest investment ever” and cost $230 million. “You don’t spend that much money without a very good reason, and this morning’s Washington Post is that reason—a better printed, better-organized paper,” he wrote. “Within these walls work some of the best engravers, press operators, mailers and helpers, machinists, electricians, engineers, paper handlers, and general workers in the American newspaper industry […] you don’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars unless you have confidence in your readers and community and an unshakeable determination to meet their needs. No newspaper has better or more loyal readers, and none works harder to earn and keep its readers’ trust.”
You know the rest of the story. Graham eventually sold the newspaper to Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, for a little more than The Post paid for those printing presses. In the short term, Bezos invested in the paper but has appeared to have lost interest in employing large numbers of good journalists, at least some of whom reported aggressively on his various businesses. On Wednesday the Post laid off hundreds of journalists, which destroyed entire sections of the newspaper, including much of its foreign bureau coverage, and gutted many of its sections.
I already mined my dad’s history at The Washington Post for an article about how Bezos was killing the paper that I wrote back in 2024. When people ask me why I became a journalist, “my dad printed the Washington Post” is always the first thing I mention. But it goes a bit deeper than that.
One of my first internships in college was at Washington Post Express, the free daily paper that was handed out on the Metro that at the time operated out of an office in Virginia away from the main Washington Post newsroom alongside washingtonpost.com. These all operated somewhat separately from the regular newspaper for what were, in retrospect, obviously misguided business reasons. And I majored in journalism at the University of Maryland, where I took a sportswriting class with George Solomon, who was the longtime editor of the paper’s legendary sports section, which was unceremoniously killed Wednesday. In Solomon’s class, we had to read All Those Mornings at the Post, written by the legendary sportswriter Shirley Povich. Every major Washington Post sportswriter came in to talk to our class at some point, which is one of the few things I actually remember from journalism school. The Washington Post has been a critical institution in my life and in the lives of millions of people who live in the D.C. area. “We lost something very, very big today,” Solomon said on Wednesday. “The owner of the newspaper is a very successful man, and he may see that he made a mistake.”
What we’re seeing, though, is not a mistake. Unlike the Graham family in the late 1990s, Jeff Bezos has no reason to try to make his newspaper better or to try to best serve its readers. The newspaper's finances are barely a rounding error compared to Bezos's wealth, but what its journalists do—accountability journalism about the rich and powerful—does not serve someone who is rich and powerful. The Washington Post and many of its reporters are no longer useful to Bezos, and so he has decided to get rid of them.
The Washington Post’s journalists, many of whom lost their jobs this week, have continued to do critical work, but Bezos has been systematically making the paper worse for years. Like other news outlets, they have suffered from regular cuts. Under Bezos, The Washington Post also announced plans to jam weird AI into the paper, refused to allow the paper to endorse a presidential candidate, and meddled with its opinion section, leading to mass subscriber cancellations. Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post no longer, as Graham wrote in his letter all those years ago, has an “unshakeable determination to meet [readers’] needs.”
As I wrote in that 2024 article called “the billionaire is the threat, not the solution,” the biggest threat to The Washington Post for years has been Bezos, not the difficulties of the news industry, The Post’s business model, the macroeconomy, or anything else. In the utterly psychotic letter to readers that spurred my article, Bezos wrote “you can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests.” You can also look at his ownership of The Post as what it actually is: completely irrelevant to his wealth, and an annoyance under an administration that demands fealty, bribes, and ritual sacrifices from businesses and major media companies. Bezos could fund The Washington Post well past his own death, but he clearly has zero interest in doing this. The news business is hard, but we simply cannot keep relying on the idea that journalism can be funded by billionaires whose personal interests are at direct odds with accountability work.
In our current kleptocracy, there is no need for a multibillionaire with tons of business before the government to invest in or have a media company focused on journalism about the administration or about the rich and powerful. The collateral damage is all of the good journalists who have lost their jobs, the legacy of the Washington Post, and the people of the Washington, D.C. metro area. Bezos has found an easier, faster way to get what he wants. The layoffs at The Post come just days after Amazon spent roughly the $75 million to release the Melania bribe documentary. You don’t spend that much money without a very good reason.
2026-02-04 23:53:58
Archeologists in Germany have unearthed a mysterious underground tunnel built centuries ago within a prehistoric burial ground, marking a “very special” discovery according to a recent release from the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (LDA) of Saxony-Anhalt.
The buried tunnel measures about two-feet wide and four-feet high, and was likely constructed anywhere between 800 to 1,100 years ago near the town of Reinstedt. Archeologists found pottery that dates to about the 13th or 14th century in the chamber, and also discovered a separate cavity that contained a horseshoe, a fox skeleton, and some small mammal bones. A layer of charcoal in the tunnel suggests that fires were once lit in this space.
The tunnel is just one of hundreds of similar structures, known as erdstalls, that have been discovered across Europe. Fascinatingly, nobody knows what function they served, with the debated possibilities including use as hideaways or sites for cultic activity. Erdstalls are “man-made underground tunnel systems, sometimes with chamber-like extensions,” said Jochen Fahr, an archaeologist at LDA who organized the excavation in an email to 404 Media. “Around a dozen such findings are known from the federal state of Saxony-Anhalt, which means that the density of these structures is lower in our region than it is in others. Their function has not yet been clarified and may also vary from case to case.”
“Possible interpretations include hiding places in case of danger or storage cellars,” Fahr continued. “A cultic-religious function could also be possible, as a kind of Christian chapel. The interpretation of these structures is made more difficult by the fact that the examples known to us contain little or no archaeological finds, which makes it very difficult to draw any firm conclusions on their function.”
Researchers initially set out to survey this site last year before the construction of wind turbines in the area. The site was already known as the location of a trapezoidal ditch that was used as a burial ground by the Baalberge people, who lived in Saxony-Anhalt during the Neolithic period of prehistory 6,000 years ago.
“In the course of the site‘s further investigation and documentation, the erdstall was discovered,” Fahr explained. “It had been dug into the southern part of the trapezoidal ditch thousands of years after the ditch‘s construction. Initially, the erdstall appeared as a well-defined elongated oval pit, about two meters long and up to 75 centimeters wide, which cut the older ditch almost at right angles.”
“This led to the assumption that it could be a burial—but the fact that the finding then turned out to be something completely different, that it was in fact an erdstall, was an unexpected surprise that caused fascination and excitement among the team,” he added.
The team speculated that the people who dug out this passageway may have deliberately selected the ancient burial ground as a secret hideaway. The area may have been “generally avoided by the population due to its special nature—perhaps a pagan burial site—and was therefore particularly suitable as a hiding place,” according to the press release.
Hundreds of erdstalls have been found across Europe, and they are often associated with local folklore passed down across generations. Because the tunnels are normally extremely narrow, some legends cast erdstalls as home to dwarfs, goblins, and other diminutive mythical creatures, which is why they are known as Schratzlloch (goblin holes) or Zwergloch (dwarf holes) in some regions.
Some of the most famous examples include the Beate Greithanner erdstall, a passage that was discovered in 2011 after a dairy cow fell into it. The Ratgöbluckn erdstall in Austria is one of the rare passages that is big enough to safely accommodate tourists.
The new erdstall found at Reinstedt deepens the mystery of these structures, which have intrigued archeologists for decades and still remain largely unexplained.
“The excavation has been completed, the team is currently in the process of evaluating the findings and finds,” Fahr said. “In this context, my colleagues are also in the process of delving deeper into the topic of the erdstall, based on the latest literature on the subject, for example. A scholarly publication is planned.”
“It is also hoped that further findings in the future will help us to better understand the phenomenon of erdstalls and, in particular, to further clarify their function,” he concluded.
2026-02-04 22:05:33
The FBI has been unable to access a Washington Post reporter’s seized iPhone because it was in Lockdown Mode, a sometimes overlooked feature that makes iPhones broadly more secure, according to recently filed court records.
The court record shows what devices and data the FBI was able to ultimately access, and which devices it could not, after raiding the home of the reporter, Hannah Natanson, in January as part of an investigation into leaks of classified information. It also provides rare insight into the apparent effectiveness of Lockdown Mode, or at least how effective it might be before the FBI may try other techniques to access the device.