Agentic Coding and the Economics of Open Source

Welcome to the Practical AI podcast, where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work, and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive, and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn, x, or Blue Sky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content, and AI insights. You can learn more at practicalai.fm. Now onto the show. Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI podcast. I'm Chris Benson, principal AI research engineer. And, with me today, I have a a guest I've been looking forward to for some time now. I have, doctor Miklos Skoren, who is a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna, and he has written a really interesting paper on, on the effect of Vibe coding, on open source. So Welcome to the show. Really excited to have you here today. Thank you, and thanks for having me. Yeah. So I think this is a a slightly different, you know, take for us. We tend to, in the on the show, you know, leap straight into models and all sorts of stuff. But I know you're a professor of economics and, and you study incentive systems. And so I'm really interested in understanding how you turn that particular lens, of economics onto open source. And so I was wondering if for listeners, if you could, you know, kinda talk a little bit about what drew you into the the the notion of exploring open source, through that lens of yours, upfront? You know, what was the what was the first thing that said this is something that that we need to go study? Yeah. Let me let me, give a little bit of background on that. So, as an economist, I'm my research is really focusing on, competitiveness. So, what does it take for a company to be competitive in the marketplace, or what does it take for a country to be to be competitive? And for a long time, I've been really interested in, whether it's technology that makes a business succeed or whether it's a talent that that they have or maybe both or maybe there's some interaction between technology and and talent. And, I would also call myself kind of an accidental software developer in the sense that, economics is a very quantitative science, and there's a lot of, computational research involved. And but I was never trained, as a software developer, but, you know, we have to be, effective at using your computer. So and and this part, I actually enjoy at least as much as as, thinking about the economic incentives that you mentioned or the other parts of of the science. And so, the the story of this paper is, we've actually been thinking with …