One of the cool things about code is that you can build stuff out of thin air, basically for free. It's not like woodworking where you have to pay for the wood.
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
adamddev1
I like the "maintainer stays in control" part, but isn't that also a problem in a way?
The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.
If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?
KomoD
At first I was like "i want to use ai but dont have the money to burn for api tokens" cool.
But then I realized the backers are essentially saying "i have money and could support developers but i choose to give the money directly to a mega corp and skip the human".
I recommend you remove the policy of "Whatever the run didn't spend goes straight back to your backers' wallets." and make sure the human behind the wheel gets to eat. Somehow
accountrequired
Just finance the project for god sake, why introducing another "gift card" that they sell at cashiers? Let the maintainer spend the money, maybe he/she needs bread, not tokens
dgan
Just curious, why is there a login gate before seeing the list of projects that participate in the platform? Usually similar donation(?) websites list those publicly for better visibility and less friction.
AKSF_Ackermann
What if the maintainer doesn’t want to implement a particular feature at the moment?
I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.
thih9
Really interesting solution to the AI PR problem. Keeping the maintainers in the driver's seat for issue prioritization is definitely the right approach.
How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?
grrinkarthi
I always thought that the donate tokens thing would be done by sending some tokens from your personal sub to the maintainer's pool with some sort of proxy for tokens with rules, in a more direct way without doing it in cash, but yeah that's where the sweet fees live.
If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.
frangonf
Better yet: give them cold hard cash instead of what is arguably monopoly money for many OSS devs. Ironically this is something GitHub made "easy" with sponsorships several years ago.
tfrancisl
I think I've read from a few different sources that the Claude Code $100-$200/mo plans are subsidized so hard that it's basically $2k-$8k/mo in "would-be" equivalent API token usages.
This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?
Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.
comments (10)
We are moving into a weird time where people are assuming that now we have to pay machines churn out code.
Somehow they packaged up our own ability to think and are selling it back to us. If they can get us to forget how to do it we'll be the perfect customers, dependent forever.
adamddev1
The AI provider gets paid, the platform gets paid (20% is a lot in my opinion!), and the maintainer gets more unpaid work: another PR to plan, review, revise, merge, and then maintain... that's a lot of work.
If people are willing to fund an issue, why should that money mainly cover LLM tokens rather than maintainer effort? Or at least, why doesn't the leftover money go to the maintainer instead of back to the donors?
KomoD
accountrequired
dgan
AKSF_Ackermann
I suppose this is the most common scenario - I doubt features are not getting implemented because maintainers are lacking tokens.
thih9
How are you handling the token allocation under the hood, is this managed via a GitHub App integration, and can backers target specific issues or just the repo as a whole?
grrinkarthi
If this gets any traction, the "share tokens with a friend" could be good PR for the labs, instead of buy me a coffee, buy me a clanker.
frangonf
tfrancisl
This kind of makes sense in that space while the subsidies (if true) last?
Unrelated, "tokens" feels very like... back-then blockchain to me. All the craze.
MuffinFlavored