Good Morning! Harvard just put a jaw-dropping $8.8 trillion price tag on open source software, and it's making companies look real cheap. Meanwhile, the U.S. has lost a quarter of its programming jobs in just two years—but, it's not as bad as it sounds. And Cloudflare has a new way of trolling AI bots with a maze of fake content, and we’re here for it.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

Open Source Is Worth $8.8 Trillion According to Harvard

Context: A Harvard study just dropped a number that feels like a typo: $8.8 trillion — that’s how much it would cost companies to build the open-source software they rely on if OSS vanished tomorrow. For comparison, global software spend in 2020? $3.4 trillion. The kicker? A mere 3,000 developers (about 5% of OSS contributors) drive 95% of that value.

Researchers at Harvard Business School, using GitHub stats and cost estimation models like COCOMO II, finally slapped a price tag on the invisible scaffolding holding up basically every tech company. Here’s the wild part:

• Supply value (cost to create OSS): ~$4.2 billion

• Demand value (cost to replace OSS): ~$8.8 trillion

• Go alone accounts for $5T+ in demand-side value.

• Python? Only $55M in supply-side value despite being everywhere.

So yeah, Go’s killing it commercially, while Python might be getting freeloaded a bit.

Why It Matters: Open source isn’t just “nice to have” anymore — it is the modern tech economy. But companies aren’t pulling their weight. The researchers are basically saying: “Hey, if you’re gonna eat from the buffet, maybe help do the dishes?”

1 in 4 Programming Jobs... Gone?

Context: A recent Washington Post piece dropped a stat that made a lot of devs choke on their cold brew: 1 in 4 programming jobs in the U.S. have disappeared in the last two years — the biggest crash in coding employment since forever. Programmer headcount is now lower than it’s been since 1980. That’s before Gen X even had a driver’s license.

What’s Really Going On: Turns out, “programmers” ≠ “software developers.” The BLS makes a distinction:

• Programmers write code based on someone else's spec.

• Developers design, architect, and build systems end-to-end.
  And developers are still doing okay — it’s the more narrowly scoped “programmer” roles that are shrinking fast.

Why?

• AI + low/no-code = fewer humans needed for grunt work

• Cloud services offload whole departments

• Legacy roles labeled “programmer” aren’t keeping up

• Outsourcing is back with a vengeance

• Post-ZIRP startup contraction = fewer vanity tech jobs

TL;DR: This isn’t a death knell for coding careers — it’s a relabeling. “Programming jobs” are vanishing, but software engineering is evolving. If you're writing Python scripts and calling it a day, time to level up. Think architecture, infra, ML, security, or dev tools. Specialization > survival.

Also, pro tip: always read the job descriptions, not just the titles. Welcome to the new era of software work.

Bots, Meet the Maze: Cloudflare’s AI Labyrinth Is Diabolically Brilliant

Context: If you’ve ever had your site scraped by a bot slurping up your content like it’s a buffet, Cloudflare’s got your back—with a flamethrower disguised as a maze. Their new tool, AI Labyrinth, is designed to waste bots’ time using their own tricks: generative AI. Instead of blocking sketchy AI crawlers (which just makes them sneakier), Cloudflare now lets them wander deep into a rabbit hole of AI-generated pages until they’re exhausted and exposed.

How It Works (and Why It’s Genius):

• Detects bad bot activity without alerting the bot

• Serves AI-generated “real-looking” content that’s totally irrelevant

• Bots crawl deeper, wasting compute and giving themselves away

• What about the legit users? Totally unaffected

• Traps become training data for better bot detection models

Cloudflare’s pre-generates this fake-but-scientific content using Workers AI, then hides the links from real users while laying a tasty breadcrumb trail for bots. If a crawler follows 4+ of these links, it’s basically wearing a "Hi, I'm a bot" T-shirt.

Welcome to the era of AI-on-AI cyber defense. And yes, the bots are losing.

🔥 More Notes

• Nvidia Names AI Chips After Tech Legends: In a tribute to pioneers like Grace Hopper and Ada Lovelace, Nvidia is naming its AI chips after historical figures who shaped computing. It’s a clever mix of branding, education, and respect for the giants of tech history.

• UK Taps AI to Fix Productivity Crisis: WPP’s CEO says AI could be the key to solving the UK’s economic productivity problem. With tools like Gemini being integrated into creative workflows, companies are seeing faster, smarter output across the board.

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