Recently been thinking about this exact issue. It's deeper than just money—AI fundamentally shifts what drives people to build. The magic of open-source was never purely technical; it was that human connection. You knew someone real, somewhere, would benefit from your code. That mattered. But when machines become the end-users? When agents replace humans in that feedback loop? Something essential gets lost. The intrinsic motivation—that sense of creating something meaningful for another person—starts to fade. The question isn't whether AI is powerful. It's whether we can preserve what made building in the open community so rewarding in the first place.