The harder a piece of code is to parse, the more you will tend to rely on LLM-based analysis and generation to maintain and build from it. Illegibility to humans is vendor lock-in. That's the business model.

The enclosure of the FOSS commons may seem like a programmer-specific problem, but it really affects everyone. Privacy-preserving apps like Signal, for example, serve a purpose precisely because they're open and can be audited. Take away that ability to verify the developer's claims by parsing the code, and all guarantees are lost. The more that AI vendors succeed in locking in the FOSS commons, the less transparency we'll have into what our software actually does.

It is 0% coincidence that these technologies are being pushed by some of the least transparent companies on the planet.