Everyone’s having a blast with their new vibe coding superpowers. But I keep thinking about something that doesn’t get enough attention in all the excitement.
The reason LLMs can write code at all isn’t magic: it’s because millions of developers wrote that code in public, for free, for decades. GitHub Copilot was trained on source code from public repositories on GitHub. ChatGPT and GPT-4’s coding abilities come from training on vast amounts of open source code repositories. Even Claude learned from publicly available code.
The vibe coding era exists because people chose to share instead of hoard.
But it goes deeper than training data. The web as we know it was built on open source. Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JavaScript frameworks, WordPress itself – none of the infrastructure we take for granted would exist without a culture of people sharing what they built instead of locking it away. And now that same culture of openness is what made it possible to train models that can code alongside us.
The flywheel works because open source enables AI, which then helps more people contribute to open source. But it only keeps spinning if we keep feeding it; if we don’t keep supporting open source, and if people keep creating closed-source vibe coded applications, AI could theoretically end up cannibalizing itself. The future training data becomes increasingly AI-generated, closed-source code instead of human-written, open contributions. The quality degrades. The commons shrinks.
Ironically, one of the fastest-growing AI products right now proves the power of staying open. OpenClaw, the viral AI agent that hit 200,000+ GitHub stars faster than any project in history, was built by one Austrian developer who “vibe coded” 43 failed projects before accidentally creating something that had Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg competing to hire him. It’s completely open source, and that openness is exactly what made it explode.
So as we enjoy these new superpowers, it’s worth asking: are we giving back to the thing that made them possible? If you benefit from open source – and if you’re building anything on the web, you do – keep this in mind. Code, documentation, sponsorship, advocacy, Five for the Future if you’re in the WordPress space. Whatever’s in your reach.
The vibe coding era is really exciting. Let’s make sure we’re part of building what comes next.
