I'm Archiving Picocrypt

This is also a good opportunity to remember that MIT is not a strong enough open source license, and if you want to prevent corporations making money off your work, make it AGPL or even SSPL, plus a statement that AI training creates a derivative work (the latter may or may not have any legal effect).

MIT is a donation of your labour to corporations. With a stronger license, at least they're more likely to contribute back or to pay you for a looser license.

My boss has taken this approach, and it took a load off the "LLM pressure".

MIT isn’t “weak” because it allows LLM training; it’s weak because it puts zero obligations on the recipient.

Blocking “LLM training” in a license feels satisfying, but I’ve run into three practical issues while benchmarking models for clients:

1. Auditability — You can grep for GPL strings; you can’t grep a trillion-token corpus to prove your repo wasn’t in it. Enforcement ends up resting on whistle-blowers, not license text.

2. Community hard-forks — “No-AI” clauses split the ecosystem. Half the modern Python stack depends on MIT/BSD; if even 5 % flips to an LLM-ban variant, reproducible builds become a nightmare.

3. Misaligned incentives — Training is no longer the expensive part. At today’s prices a single 70 B checkpoint costs about \$60 k to fine-tune, but running inference at scale can exceed that each day. A license that focuses on training ignores the bigger capture point.

A model company that actually wants to give back can do so via attribution, upstream fixes, and funding small maintainers (things AGPL/SSPL rarely compel). Until we can fingerprint data provenance, social pressure—or carrot contracts like RAIL terms—may move the needle more than another GPL fork.

Happy to be proven wrong; I’d love to see a case where a “no-LLM” clause was enforced and led to meaningful contributions rather than a silent ignore.

>The money didn't go towards the author.

Perhaps many would have refused to donate if they knew that the project would be archived in a year. Collecting for audit and then archiving the project is, in a way, a violation of expectations.

Yes, I found this a profoundly weird comment. The audited code will be forever available and audited.

Seems like the author is abandoning software because in his opinion due to AI explosion employers don't care anymore about code quality and only quality.

I don't get it either, because that has always been the case, thus most of his post is borderline non sense.

Imo, what happened is that he took the opportunity of him entering academia to vent some stuff and quit maintaining his project.

I believe you need to separate two things:

- The author enjoyed writing quality open source code

- The author needs to make strategic decisions for his own career and livelihood and he doesn't have enough bandwidth for both

I don't feel he is happy about the decision he needs to make and he is pointing to something dark happening to software development and open source.

Now this is not new, and didn't start with LLM. I am sure if we ask the OpenBSD devs what they think about the modern mainstream open source ecosystem, docker, full stack development, etc. they see it like we might look at LLM generated code. This is just a question how much of a purist you are.

I was thinking exactly the same : I also don't get it (even though I totally get that someone may lose motivation to work on a project, and certainly has no obligation to continue. But this justification sounds a bit weird to me).

Could this mean that he has been approached by some "men in black" asking to insert some backdoor in the code or to stop working on it, together with a gag order ? (actually I also wondered the same a long time ago with Truecrypt, even though to my knowledge no backdoor has ever been found in further audits...)

Did you not read the comment he wrote? It's straightforward

This is a post framed in medias res, from the perspective of the developer, as portrayed by themselves, asking an LLM to construct the post that they post immediately afterwards.

I'm unsure if the post is actually created by Gemini or the developer's imitation. I suspect the latter.

There's a cli version anyways... https://github.com/Picocrypt/CLI

Wouldn't that make it femtocrypt?

> muha ha ha!

Feeling ok? Do you need some support?

> It's not easy to fix in the code either because it'll require major changes to the GUI library which can get messy, especially since GUIs were never a strength of Go.

If you're using a portable library that needs to render graphics on mac, it's probably using OpenGL to do it unless it has a platform-specific backend.

Considering the author is explicitly going into AI research, has an AI-generated profile picture, and claims front-and-centre on their website they are excited about LLMs, I don’t think that analogy works. Or rather, it is like a knitter throwing away their needles to eagerly go work in the loom manufacturing industry.

So basically, he’s leaving software development because the job market is bad. Instead, he’s joining AI research which (currently) has a more healthy job market. That seems pretty reasonable to me, given that even widely used open source projects are only barely financially viable. Many open source projects end when the author finally gets a girlfriend, this one ends for a new job. Seems like a good outcome to me. Plus truly fascinating presentation.

I mean your analogy is almost there. The loom is pretty old.

What your grasping for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-loom_riots

Where a precipitous drop in earning power, combined with longer working hours, high inflation and large companies making people unemployed cause large social unrest.

And yeah, I can see why they rioted.

It is a matter of time. 5 years no problem. In 10 years some devs will be replaced. In 15 years, i don't think that "pure" developer jobs will exist in the most companies.