Dependencies
Post #7834 · source on Telegram
xkcd Dependency, 2026 Edition: Nebraska Maintainer Goes GenAI
Description
A parody of xkcd #2347 'Dependency' in Randall Munroe's hand-drawn style: a precarious tower of stacked gray blocks labeled 'ALL MODERN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE' with a curly brace at the top. An arrow points to the tiny, load-bearing peg near the bottom of the stack, with caption text reading: 'A project some random person in Nebraska has decided to switch to genAI in 2026 after getting free tokens from the slop machine vendors'. The original comic's punchline - all infrastructure resting on a thanklessly maintained hobby project - is updated for the AI era: that same critical dependency is now being vibe-maintained by an LLM because the vendor handed out free tokens, swapping the single-maintainer risk for AI-slop supply-chain risk
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Comments
8Comment deleted
The Nebraska maintainer was a single point of failure; the LLM replacement is a single point of failure with infinite confidence and no commit history it can explain
The bus factor is still one; now the bus has an API key and promotional credits.
requesting context 😬 Comment deleted
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/releases/tag/7.0.0 chardet was rewritten with ai, and there's drama about it, because the current maintainer changed the license to a less restrictive one Comment deleted
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327 Comment deleted
it does seem like they wiped the repo before doing this rewrite: https://github.com/chardet/chardet/commit/7e25bf40bb4ae6884892c094080e011290494947 Comment deleted
Plot twist: the new licence agreement was vibe-coded by AI, too. Comment deleted
Coming up next, Internet blackout because of chardet Comment deleted