With AIs wide open… All Things Open 2025 Chris Heilmann, WeAreDevelopers

30 years of sneaking ”open” into my work… • • • • • • • • • • • Radio newscaster => quit, taught myself HTML and Perl Agency work eCommerce Etoys.com - UK, US DotCom crash Government websites, larger clients Enterprise CMS (India, UK) Yahoo (yay open!) Mozilla (even more open!) Microsoft (lots of open) WeAreDevelopers

WeAreDevelopers = Europe’s biggest independent developer community Newsletter Podcast Live Show Magazine

“Open” means… • Access for all, independent of location or wealth • Access to functionality (APIs) with documentation • Access to code • In-built quality control (lots of eyes) • Longevity – people can build on your work • Building things that work • Following agreed procedures to ensure quality The current hype around AI is the antithesis of almost all of that.

AI overviews instead of search results = the truth according to company X

AI Image and video generation = expensive, faux creativity without license considerations

Chat systems and research helpers = unsolicited scraping and bots serving bots

Agents browsing and buying things… = a malware creator’s wet dream

AI aided development • “AI” IDE = fork of Visual Studio Code with all security settings turned off. • AI features of these “free tools” costs you tokens • On average, this means $100k for a development team/year. = subscription in disguise

  • Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code

Don’t trust the bots… • Only 33% of developers trust AI accuracy in 2025, down from 43% in 2024 and 42% in 2023. • AI favourability dropped from 77% in 2023 to 72% in 2024 to just 60% this year.

Fixing bad results isn’t fun… 66% of developers cite “AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite” as their top frustration 45% say debugging AI-generated code takes more time than expected. AI tools promise productivity gains but may actually create new categories of technical debt.

Writing or generating code should always aim to solve an issue. How much code we write in what time is a pointless metric…

Vibe coding

C

CEOs can now do production code! Our first outage from LLM-written code https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-writtencode?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

Finding the issue… “The trigger for the CPU spikes both times was our CEO logging in. We re-deployed to get a clean start, permanently banned him from the service, and moved on.”

Vibe coding full products… = dubious, insecure legacy code

Let’s talk about we use AI…

We have a ton of content! • Weekly newsletter with 150k subscribers • Weekly live show with guests • Magazine articles every few days • Podcast every few days • 10 years WeAreDevelopers World Congress: • ~2500 – 3000 hours of talk and workshop footage x 10 • This year it is 12 TB of data

Indexing and remixing > Generating with AI

Work in progress…

Using AI to make video more accessible…

Your dev skill playlist…

Let’s talk about our jobs, longevity and how we deliver software.

Let’s talk about our jobs, longevity and how we deliver software.

Let’s talk about our jobs, longevity and how we deliver software.

Let’s talk about our jobs, longevity and how we deliver software.

We learn by imitation and from mistakes. How can junior developers learn if they’re encouraged to let magical AI do everything for them?

Dunning-Kruger Effect A cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge. … we made this bias the go-to effect of AI …

We protected the web from corporate takeover before. We need to do this again.

Not by demonising AI and the companies that succeed in it. But by taking part and offering alternatives…

AI can make us more efficient; it can’t make us more creative or magically excellent at anything.

Let’s show the world how the power, love and dedication of open can move this from marketing hype to the next level of human-computer interaction.

Free WeAreDevelopers World Congress Berlin, Germany 08-10/07/2026 (if you get picked as a speaker)

WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America San Jose, California 23-25/09/2026 10% cheaper! Free (if you get picked as a speaker)

Thanks! ChristianHeilmann.com WeAreDevelopers.com Developer-Advocacy.com chris@wearedevelopers.com @codepo8@toot.cafe @codepo8.bsky.social linkedin.com/in/christianheilmann/