Stephen Downes

If you develop software, you know what package managers are. They are services you can run in your development environment to find and install pre-packaged bundles of software designed for a specific purpose. For example, if I'm creating a web application, I might want to use React, which is a collection of web interface functions. Package developers load their software into the manager, and application develoipers use the managers to find and install that software. As this article notes, package managers "are now critical infrastructure for AI products. They're in the 'hot path', as we say in the biz." That's why AI labs like Anthropic + OpenAI buying them up? I can see the logic. But it's a fragile ecosystem, and I've run into issues many times, as one package is updated and creates a version conflict with the application or with other packages. Or one package develops a security issue that impacts a whole project. Or a package just doesn't do what you want it to do. I prefer to work without packages, if I can manage it.