The future of FOSS, SWE and Technical Education

Objective

Discuss the impact of AI on FOSS, Software Engineering and Technical Education, and where do we go from here.

Description

The last year or so has been a roller coaster for the software ecosystem. LLMs have gotten dramatically better. The number of FOSS projects and contributions has shot [0] up [1], along with the slop [2] that comes with them. Non-technical people are now able to build solutions that would have taken months of engineering time and effort, just using natural language.

In an effort to preserve their craft, AI skeptics have argued about the quality and reliability of these tools, and some have even vowed not to use them. Optimists, on the other hand, have handed these tools the keys to their entire digital lives [3]. We (the FOSS United Foundation) have talked to multiple FOSS maintainers, students, and engineering leaders over the last few months, and there is a certain sense of confusion and ambiguity in everyone’s minds about the future of open source, software engineering as a career, and how we teach and learn software.

It’s too early to say whether Software Engineering is truly dead, but it is clear that these tools are going to have a massive impact on the future of FOSS, Software Engineering and technical education. We also feel this is going to lead to a fundamental reimagination of carers in tech. This panel is an effort to initiate a discussion around this existential crisis that surrounds the FOSS community and sit with that discomfort.

Key Discussion Points

1. Trends across Communities, Academia and Industry
2. Companies and SWE
3. The junior developer crisis (and hiring)
4. Rise of the vibe coder
5. Education and Academia
6. Interdisciplinary learning
7. Computational thinking
8. Solving (and finding) the right problems
9. Social Sector
10. Imagining careers beyond Big Tech
11. The need for developers in the Social Sector
12. FOSS (and AI) for good
13. Future of FOSS in the age of AI
14. Redefining “maintainers”
15. Evaluating FOSS to adopt amidst an abundance of projects
16. Collaboration and slop

References

[0] - https://www.wipo.int/en/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/2026/software-collaboration-hits-5-billion-github-commits

[1] - https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

[2] - https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/07/14/death-by-a-thousand-slops/

[3] - https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/135k-openclaw-ai-agents-exposed-online

https://nadh.in/blog/code-is-cheap/

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/26/the-pressure/

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-has-basically-killed-stack-overflow

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

https://www.anthropic.com/research/labor-market-impacts

https://systemsthinkingalliance.org/wicked-problems/

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12689981/