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Many FOSS developers and teams are vocal and critical of AI tooling used in software development and maintenance today. They have some good reasons for that. Development by specification can create a mess of code that nobody can truly read and understand after a while, and the entropy can only increase over time. One can try to restore order by working in a strongly ordered manner, making only small improvements to the existing codebase, all under human control; also, introducing a full-coverage testing codebase can help ensure we don't mess up the existing codebase with every new change. Being extremely analytical and imposing strict rules for code creation/change can also help, etc.

I recently sent a brief answer to @krille on Mastodon about what managing an average FOSS project looks like in 2026. Christian is the main author of a Flutter app (FluffyChat, a Matrix client). Indeed, this deserves a more extensive discussion.

Three years after my last public appearance at a local FOSS event, my old friend Marco brought me on board again as a speaker for LinuxDay 2026 in October. While my latest speeches were mostly about the status and governance of the FOSS domain, this time I’ll present something more technical.

The use of AI tools for development (AI-aided development, AIAD) and intellectual work is a disputed, hot topic. I’m generally on the pragmatic side in that regard. While the environmental impact of AI systems is evident and a reasonable concern, these tools, when used with a grain of salt and a responsible approach, can solve problems that would otherwise be hard to manage. Keep man in the loop, to say it in one sentence, and do not pretend that such tools can fully replace human judgment and capabilities.

Self-hosting is the modern mantra, often presented as the final solution to dependence on big companies. Unfortunately, NASes are not a backup, and in most situations you have to arrange a last-resort escape: a B-plan and possibly even a C-plan. This is a collection of horror stories from my personal experience. They all ended (mostly) happily, but usually at the cost of a replacement/integration, and they show what can go wrong when you rely too much on a NAS (or a NAS pool).

Sovereignty in the EU is now the trend, at least as a conceptual idea. Someone finally discovered that most of the Western world is dependent on a few US big companies, and the current status of Geopolitics is quite confusing, causing stomachaches and concerns among multiple governments.

Ok, such dramas and the whole topic are starting to be annoying. The last episode was the rsync project with the well-respected Andrew Tridgell as maintainer, who initiated a Claude-based development effort for the 3.4 series a few months ago. The rsync tool is a well-known, widely used tool for copying files between hosts in a smart way, includes a daemon to optimize file transfers, and serves as an entry point for synchronization.

I already dealt with the status of the WWW in the recent past. See, specifically, the authoritative opinion of Sir Tim Berners-Lee on that. Multiple dynamics have upset the initial idea of a distributed, democratic, and influential worldwide system, as conceived in the 90s, including the roles of BigCorps, socials, and geopolitics. What appears to be the last brick in the grave of the WWW is the current AI wave, which introduces two distinct elements of breaking an already compromised equilibrium.

Some months ago, I participated in this Mastodon poll. My thesis was that, in general, there is no presumptive quality flag that can be added to a product, whether it was created with AI-aided tools or not. My opinion sparked a small, heated controversy among some readers.

I recently finished reading Simone Aliprandi’s second edition of a book I would recommend to many people interested in either authoring software and databases or making creative works. ‘The Artificial Author’, as its title suggests, deals with the role of generative AI in creative jobs seen from a legal point of view. This massive book seeks to shed light on a central yet complex issue that, in recent years, has affected many people, not only in the IT sector but also across many sectors of the creative industry.