Not just development, distribution of software may change as well

Even if you are as averse to semver as I used to be in the course of my programming activity, you can still think of open source software distribution as something that used to follow a fixed number of steps. There is a branch where developments happen, and this branch oftentimes happens to be not really ready for reliable work. Then you freeze the developments for a certain amount of time (even if, in the meantime, the work can continue on some new unstable branch), fix bugs, ask people to test it. At some point the number of bug reports starts to drop, your team and your users start to believe there are no longer obvious critical flaws that are easy to discover in the next few weeks: then you call the branch 2.4 or whatever, and that's it.

However now, with AI coding, it's not just development that has changed, but also the act itself of using software is affected: it is not just you that can ask an AI to do certain changes to the software, but also the recipient of the software itself. This is obvious in the domains where a piece of software has its main user base among programmers, but this is also true in general, as more and more technologically inclined users have AI access and coding agents.

Because of this change, the idea of just having a stable branch with everything polished, and an unstable branch where everything is a work in progress, may no longer be the right way to do things. A code repository can also be a finished product, but could be even more useful if it is a template for how to do things around a given problem. Maybe the user will modify the code in order to specialize it for a specific set of requirements, hardware, specific problems to solve. Also, what is too unstable or unproven for the general public may be the right thing for another set of users.

Take the example of Redis. For weeks now I have been iterating on a PR that provides strong memory savings for sorted sets. This work, if accepted, will hit every user of Redis, from peop…