Transcript
A (0:02)
Welcome to the Practical AI Podcast where we break down the real world applications of artificial intelligence and how it's shaping the way we live, work and create. Our goal is to help make AI technology practical, productive and accessible to everyone. Whether you're a developer, business leader, or just curious about the tech behind the buzz, you're in the right place. Be sure to connect with us on LinkedIn X or Bluesky to stay up to date with episode drops, behind the scenes content and a insights. You can learn more at PracticalAI FM. Now on to the show.
B (0:41)
Welcome to another episode of the Practical AI Podcast. I'm Chris Benson, Principal AI Research engineer and with me today I have a guest I've been looking forward to for some time now. I have Dr. Mikloskoren who is a professor of economics at Central European University in Vienna and he has written a really interesting paper on the effect of vibe coding on open source. Welcome to the show. Really excited to have you here today.
C (1:16)
Thank you and thanks for having me.
B (1:17)
Yeah, so I think this is a slightly different take for us. We tend to on the show leap straight into models and all sorts of stuff. But I know you're a professor of economics and you study incentive systems and so I'm really interested in understanding how you turn that particular lens of economics onto open source. And so I was wondering if, for listeners, if you could, you know, kind of talk a little bit about what drew you into the notion of exploring open source through that lens of yours up front. You know, what was the first thing that said? This is something that we need to go study.
C (2:04)
Yeah, let me give a little bit of background on that. So as an economist, my research is really focusing on competitiveness. So what does it take for a company to be competitive in the marketplace? Or what does it take for a country to be competitive? And for a long time I've been really interested in whether it's technology that makes a business succeed or whether it's a talent that, that they have, or maybe both, or maybe there's some interaction between technology and talent. And I would also call myself kind of an accidental software developer in the sense that economics is a very quantitative science and there's a lot of computational research involved. And what I was never trained as a software developer, but we have to be effective at using your computer. And this part I actually enjoy at least as much as thinking about the economic incentives that you mentioned or the other parts of the science. And so the story of this paper is we've actually been thinking with my co authors, Gabor Aaron and Julian. We've been thinking about the economics of the software industry for some time. Various aspects and in particular open source, the open source ecosystem. Why do people write open source code? Where are the open source developers? How do they collaborate in space? I think that's really fascinating that you can work with someone on the other end of the world. And yet actually what we see is that most of the collaborations are highly localized, so they are typically from the same city or basically a couple hours drive from one another. So these kind of things we've been exploring for some time when actually AI came about and initially we didn't really connect these. So we had the research agenda thinking about software and then we were looking at AI as consumers. So we were of course looking at ChatGPT and the amazing success of ChatGPT and we started actually thinking about, oh, we should be writing more papers. And I'm happy to tell more about how AI has impacted science. You can get back to that, but let me come back to the paper. So it took us quite a while to kind of connect these two pieces. So we are actually doing research on this. And software engineering and software development is one of the use cases where AI is really, really successful. So maybe let's try to think about that. For me, the personal. I very much remember the kind of what triggered this particular paper. It was like November or December of 2025 and I consume a lot of social media related to technology and software. And so everybody was doing Vibe coding and everybody was showcasing the app that they have developed on Reddit or X. And so like look here, I did this and you know, why don't you download it? And I was just like, my social media feeds were just flooded with these type of Vibe coded apps and I started thinking like, why would I do that? I can do it myself in half an hour. Why would I download your app when I can just go into cloud code and do it myself? Exactly to the specification that I would need. And so this kind of, in my mind it connected Vibe coding with this idea that you can actually write software for one person or just a few people. And, and then I realized that of course that has a, a major implication of how we think about the software industry that have, we have been working on with, with my co authors. So okay, let's write a paper about Vibe coding. And so that's, that's how we started about that.
