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"Devtools Must Be Open Source" Argues LLMs Removed the Last Excuse — Compilation Friction — for Not Reading Your Tools' Source
This essay hit Hacker News on August 3, 2026 with 713 points and was linked by Simon Willison the same day. The argument is narrower and better than the usual open-source advocacy: the historical barrier to inspecting and patching the tools you use daily was never licensing, it was build friction — unfamiliar toolchains, missing deps, undocumented flags. LLM assistance collapses that cost, so a developer can now prompt an agent to clone a repo, get it building, and land a local fix in the time it used to take to read the CONTRIBUTING file. That reframes closed devtools as a materially larger tax than they were two years ago.
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