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Burned out creating public software<br>How does public software evolve going forward

Manish<br>Jul 02, 2026

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I came across OpenScreen recently, its a software to create beautiful videos from your screencasts. Its the open source version of Screen Studio.

Apart from occasional hiccups, OpenScreen works great, I don’t think I would be needing the Screen Studio subscription anymore.

But the OpenScreen project was archived last week by the author.

The author was burned out maintaining the project. The project already has 38k stars and is feature complete in author’s eyes.

The project spread organically. Great for reach, terrible for expectations. Suddenly thousands of people are using something you built as a side project, and they expect it to work. Bug reports pile up. Feature requests flood in. And you can't just ignore them because these are real people trying to get real work done.

He remarked that he wasn’t good at delegating and maintaining was making him a little anxious.<br>The whole situation got me thinking -

Can one person manage a big software? why not let llm manage it?<br>What kind of structure it will have?<br>Who decides what features make it.<br>Do contributors have a say or are all features done by one person.<br>what issue if just let a llm be that person.<br>Donation in the forms of llm token costs?<br>maybe this is one of the areas where an AI can help (to avoid such burnouts).

I asked AI to generate all such scenarios

The least friction one seems to be: Public software totally driven by loop operator

One human operator/admin is designated to think and add new features to the project. No one is allowed to push code but the operator.<br>To support the project people can contribute via tokens - maybe recharge a prepaid account of the repository’s llm provider.<br>people pay with tokens coz they like the product and that directly helps the product. Its difficult to control the usage, say if operator starts using the token for some other work.

And another way in the future can be: Public software totally driven by AI

An agent in the cloud, say which could run autonomously (maybe a cron can check if any failure happens it can just restart the agent) - but might need some small amount of hand holding say if the project needs some new service API keys etc. If not found maybe can try to find an alternative or drop the feature .<br>This experiment will need to be run to see if its possible with current LLM capabilities.

Will have to wait and see how it goes!

Side note: I recently started hacking away on the same project, I wanted to add 3D perspective to the scenes, so I added them using Opus 4.8 with just a few iteration it was done.

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