Eternal November

Wed Apr 15 22:53:07 UTC 2026

			Eternal November
The new influx of users, and why it's way better than the last one

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2026/apr/15/eternal-november-generative-ai-llm/

Many people may recall Eternal September (in 1993) [0] — when Usenet
membership increased overwhelmingly — marking the annual September rush
of student joins. The ensuing moderation challenges changed the culture
of Usenet (the largest Internet discussion fora back then). Many early
Usenet adopters left; they reconnected with their communities elsewhere.
While this onslaught of “newbies” knew little of Usenet's traditional
cultural norms, they nonetheless benefited greatly from these novel
connections to discuss and learn together with people worldwide. The
times were turbulent then, but eventually new cultural norms emerged.

Today, a similar cultural change is afoot. I call it **Eternal
November**. November 2025 — the month of Opus 4.5's release [1] — has
been widely identified as a similar inflection point: LLM-backed
generative AI coding tools made a substantial leap to increased
usefulness. A new wave of software developers — unfamiliar with
traditional FOSS development culture — are innovating quickly. Their
progress is sometimes in spite of those historical cultural norms.

We're all tempted — as we were in 1993 — to shun these “newbies” and
reject their contributions aggressively. But what is really going on
here? As in 1993, good and well-intentioned people discovered newly
interesting and hitherto unexplored ways to interact and engage with
computing. FOSS's old guard naturally feels angst, concern, and even
fear. We curated our norms over decades. But these norms are not
sacrosanct. I urge us to reluctantly but seriously embrace this
opportunity. We have much to teach these newcomers, and we must resist
our arrogance of experience in assuming they've nothing to teach us.

I encourage all of us in the FOSS community to welcome the new software
developers who've adopted these tools, investigate their motivations,
and seriously consider cautiously and carefully incorporating their
workflows with ours. Seasoned software developers understand the
benefits and limitations of LLM-assisted coding tools: we've studied for
a few years the maintainability costs they incur, and the dangers of
their flagrant, undisciplined use. Some new software developers won't
care about maintainability, just as many startups today don't care when
they're making a proof of concept. Depending on the use case, this might
actually be ok, for a one-off experiment or something else that only one
person will ever use.

FOSS maintainers have decried for decades how few upstream contributions
they receive. Maintainers today mostly bemoan the “AI slop”, and I agree
that the slop is, at best, raw material to make an actual contribution.
We must seek the goal of engagement to increase human collaboration (and
thus maintainability). It is our job to recognize these, to communicate
them, and to help new software developers build maintainable projects,
when maintainability is desired, and to identify when a less
maintainable one-person fork for private use might be better. We must
perpetually service the airplane while flying it: maintain the projects
we have while create the FOSS communities of the future inside those
projects. Only this approach ensures FOSS will thrive and flourish.

Building these new FOSS communities is now just one aspect of software
freedom. Historically, software freedom has has typically necessitated
interacting with others, since changes you made on your own were
difficult to maintain out-of-tree, and the work of writing the software
changes themselves generally dwarfed the work of getting those software
changes accepted into the project they modified. However, with the
ability to re-base changes more easily with LLM-backed generative AI
coding tools (and the ease with which changes can be made generally)
there is less of a natural tendency for people to work with existing
FOSS communities. And we should be ok with that!

This is not to say we shouldn't encourage people to contribute to FOSS
projects, and join those communities. However, we do need to recognize
when someone is ready and interested in doing that (and willing to put
in a bit of extra time to help others), and when they just want to do a
thing on their own, and that's fine for them.

By recognizing what new technologies can do well, and what they can't,
and how this differs from the technologies of the past, we can not only
adapt our communities to these changes, but also take advantage of the
new wave of people who are excited about our craft, and how they can
improve personal autonomy for themselves and others. It took time, but
we adapted to the Eternal September. We can learn from that experience
and do it again. The first steps are to recognize rapid changes,
consider how they can benefit society, and then patiently and
open-mindedly bring our ideals and extensive knowledge to the table to
accelerate that positive change — while politely warning of the
drawbacks (which are obvious to us but not to the newcomers).

If you help lead a FOSS project, please join us to discuss how you've
been seeing new people join your communities, or use your software in
new and interesting ways. We will be running a series of interactive
video chats, starting on April 21 at 15:00 UTC and April 28 at 23:00 UTC
(see attached .ics files or links in [2,3]), in this room. [4] SFC staff
and volunteers will discuss these issues with the public. We'll consider
how we can adapt FOSS projects to improve pro-AI contributor onboarding
and how to better understand how newcomers are using and making software
these days. Please subscribe to us on the fediverse as well, to learn
about future such chats. SFC has dedicated 20 years already to
successfully making FOSS the best it can be. We plan to do the same for
the next 20 years, by understanding the needs of billions of new
software developers, and harnessing the new tools they are using to
improve the world for everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_(language_model)#Claude_Opus_4.5
[2] https://sfconservancy.org/docs/eternal_november-sfc_chat-20260421.ics
[3] https://sfconservancy.org/docs/eternal_november-sfc_chat-20260428.ics
[4] https://bbb-new.sfconservancy.org/rooms/welcome-llm-gen-ai-users-to-foss/join
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