A good conspiracy can be interesting even if it's false, so I don't criticise you for finding it interesting; but I downvoted because I didn't - HN is chock full of "Microsoft bad, Embrace Extend Extinguish" and it's fucking tiresome. I wrote 1700 words on how that comment makes no sense but I'll reduce it:
- Have you ever read a PR and thought "this code is useless" and the result was you deciding that "kLOC is great"? Any way I put those things (Microsoft, kLOC, AI, Github, social cliques,...) together I don't get anything sensible; Microsoft spent 7.5Bn on Github to make kLOC great to help them destroy open source? It's a crackpot word salad, not a reasoned position. At least, if it's a reasoned position they should post the reasoning.
- Github has 200,000,000+ public repositories and makes $1Bn/year revenue. How will putting AI into Github 'finally' destroy open source and why does Microsoft want to screw up a revenue stream roughly the size of Squarespace's, bigger than DigitalOcean's or Netgear's, and getting on for as big as CloudFlare's?
That said, this conspiracy theory does line up with the corporate retraction from open source writ large that's happened over the last few years (i.e. HashiCorp moving to BUSL; Red Hat ending CentOS; VMware pulling back after Broadcom ate them; etc.)
- Buy GitHub and devalue all individual projects by soft-forcing most big projects to go there and lose their branding.
- Gamify and make "development" addictive.
- Use social cliques who hype up each other's useless code and PRs and ban critics.
- Make kLOC and plagiarism great again!
This all happened before "AI". "AI" is the last logical step that will finally destroy open source, as planned by Microsoft.