You are right that when someone (a human) submits a PR it didn't cost me anything (short of my time to review it). But those folks are not a team, not someone I could rely on or direct. Open-source projects -- successful ones -- often turn into a company, and then hire a dev team. We all know this.
I have no plans to commercialize rqlite, and I certainly couldn't afford a team of human developers. But I've got Copilot (and Gemini when I use it) now. So, in a sense, I now do have a team. And it's allowed me to fix bugs and add small features I wouldn't have bothered to in the past. It's definitely faster (20 mins to fire up my computer, write the code, push the PR vs. 5 mins to create the GitHub issue, assign to Copilot, review, and merge).
Case in point: I'm currently adding change-data-capture to rqlite. Development is going faster, but it's also more erratic because I'm reviewing more, and coding less. It reminds me of when I've been a TL of a software team.
There is a new continuum. "Team" is just a convenient word to emphasize that "Tools" are moving significantly in the "Teams" direction.
The post emphasizes the degree this is true/not.
Different people are going to emphasize changing attributes of new situations using different pre-existing words/concepts. That's sensible use of language.
No, it's clickbait and that's why this submission got flagged, sorry.
A team is comprised of people. Being able to prompt an LLM to create a pull request based on specifications is very useful, but it's not a team member, the same way that VSCode isn't a team member even though autocomplete is a massive productivity increase, the same way that pypi isn't a team member even though a central third party dependency repository makes development significantly faster than not having one.
If this article were "I get a massive productivity boost from $41.73/month in developer tools" it'd be honest. As it is, it's dishonest clickbait.
Ok, that's cool that you can develop faster now, but as the other comment: it is a tool, not the cost of a team. It still for me a very strange comparison.
You are right that when someone (a human) submits a PR it didn't cost me anything (short of my time to review it). But those folks are not a team, not someone I could rely on or direct. Open-source projects -- successful ones -- often turn into a company, and then hire a dev team. We all know this.
I have no plans to commercialize rqlite, and I certainly couldn't afford a team of human developers. But I've got Copilot (and Gemini when I use it) now. So, in a sense, I now do have a team. And it's allowed me to fix bugs and add small features I wouldn't have bothered to in the past. It's definitely faster (20 mins to fire up my computer, write the code, push the PR vs. 5 mins to create the GitHub issue, assign to Copilot, review, and merge).
Case in point: I'm currently adding change-data-capture to rqlite. Development is going faster, but it's also more erratic because I'm reviewing more, and coding less. It reminds me of when I've been a TL of a software team.