Nicholas Roberts

Full Stack, Customer Success, Tech Products & Projects

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@dhh very doable, the future will thank you for this

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@samlambert I assume he/she can code, that's still worth something, possibly a lot

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

Status 402 Payment Required
https://t.co/ivqRwOsKC6

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@ThePrimeagen @javilopen yes, doing it the hard way
its like doing Karate kata vs always sparring
you need muscle memory so that you can move quickly with strength. Same with doing math, do it mentally.

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@carlrichell I believe it, in 4 hours you can create a code base it would take a team of engineers a month to understand, let alone manage. So you become immediately addicted to more vibe coding

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@dhh looks actually better quality of life than much of Europe

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@vasuman you SHOULD it, vibe coding is my like doing a google search than writing an essay.

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@MrEwanMorrison best line ever
AI: you slop, you flop

[DHH @dhh]

The web was amazing prior to the reactification of everything 😄. Hotwire's Turbo framework is based on Chris Wanstrath's original Pjax concept (that powered GitHub in those early years). This kind of speed is still possible!

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

organic intelligence
pretty soon, people who can code, and basically do any technically complex thing, by hand and by natural intelligence will become high premium

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@JackPosobiec who writes your books?

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@zebassembly use Opus 4.5

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@lhfang @NicoleShanahan

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@bcardarella DHH is a sales first CTO IMHO

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@bcardarella https://t.co/CpdXpAyTMq this is cog

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@bcardarella whats Cog?

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@jasonbosco yes, it's always confidently wrong
I use it as next gen search

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

AI actually impossible

[Marc @MarcJSchmidt]

All my new code will be closed-source from now on. I've contributed millions of lines of carefully written OSS code over the past decade, spent thousands of hours helping other people. If you want to use my libraries (1M+ downloads/month) in the future, you have to pay.

I made good money funneling people through my OSS and being recognized as expert in several fields. This was entirely based on HUMANS knowing and seeing me by USING and INTERACTING with my code. No humans will ever read my docs again when coding agents do it in seconds. Nobody will even know it's me who built it.

Look at Tailwind: 75 million downloads/month, more popular than ever, revenue down 80%, docs traffic down 40%, 75% of engineering team laid off. Someone submitted a PR to add LLM-optimized docs and Wathan had to decline - optimizing for agents accelerates his business's death. He's being asked to build the infrastructure for his own obsolescence.

Two of the most common OSS business models:
- Open Core: Give away the library, sell premium once you reach critical mass (Tailwind UI, Prisma Accelerate, Supabase Cloud...)
- Expertise Moat: Be THE expert in your library - consulting gigs, speaking, higher salary

Tailwind just proved the first one is dying. Agents bypass the documentation funnel. They don't see your premium tier. Every project relying on docs-to-premium conversion will face the same pressure: Prisma, Drizzle, MikroORM, Strapi, and many more.

The core insight: OSS monetization was always about attention. Human eyeballs on your docs, brand, expertise. That attention has literally moved into attention layers. Your docs trained the models that now make visiting you unnecessary. Human attention paid. Artificial attention doesn't.

Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity. Most popular OSS runs on economic incentives. Destroy them, they stop playing.

Why go closed-source? When the monetization funnel is broken, you move payment to the only point that still exists: access. OSS gave away access hoping to monetize attention downstream. Agents broke downstream. Closed-source gates access directly.
The final irony: OSS trained the models now killing it. We built our own replacement.

My prediction: a new marketplace emerges, built for agents. Want your agent to use Tailwind? Prisma? Pay per access. Libraries become APIs with meters. The old model: free code -> human attention -> monetization. The new model: pay at the gate or your agent doesn't get in.

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@jacques_web3 train ai

[Nicholas Roberts @niccolox]

@YayAreaNews wow