In 2009, a developer in a bedroom could build something real and share it with the world. No gatekeepers. No middlemen. Just an idea, a code editor, and an open internet full of people doing the same thing.
The Cognitive Dark Forest argues that era is over.
Code is cheap now. If you build something and signal it works, a well-resourced company can throw compute at the problem and absorb your idea before you capitalise on it. Worse, the AI platform you use to build it already knows, statistically and before you do, that your idea has legs. You are feeding the forest while the forest feeds on you.
So the rational move is to go quiet.
I’ve heard this before.
In the nineties and early 2000s, Microsoft had money, distribution, and programmers. Open source had idealism and mailing lists. Steve Ballmer famously called Linux a “cancer.” Everyone thought this was the end of open source.
Twenty years later it’s still here, because Microsoft realised they needed it. Microsoft began contributing to the Linux kernel as early as 2009, open-sourced .NET after Satya Nadella took over in 2014, and acquired GitHub in 2018.
By 2022, Aiven’s research using the Open Source Contributor Index showed Google and Microsoft each fielding over 5,000 active GitHub contributors, with combined hyperscaler contributions growing 300% in six years. The companies that were supposed to kill open source became its biggest institutional backers.
And it’s not just history. Chinese AI companies are releasing open weight models not out of generosity. They see open source as a way to build influence in a growing global AI market. It’s a deliberate strategy. And it’s working.
The open source community didn’t win by going silent. They kept sharing and creating new projects, which created more interesting side projects and businesses.
There’s a deeper version of this in Atlas Shrugged, of all places. The system Rand describes doesn’t crush innovators with brute force. It creates conditions where withdrawal feels rational. The innovators, believing they had nothing left to gain from staying visible, disappear. The result isn’t that the system wins. Everyone loses. The source of everything valuable quietly stops contributing, and the people who thought they were being protected find there’s nothing left to protect.
The fear of the forest makes you stop sharing. The community stops growing. And then you have nothing to learn from.
“Best of all, when you share your knowledge and your work with others, you receive an education in return.” – Austin Kleon, Show Your Work
LLMs learning from public knowledge isn’t new. Every developer who ever got good stood on the work of everyone before them. You learned to code by reading other people’s code. You learned to think by reading other people’s thinking. The accumulated public knowledge of the internet is what made you capable of building anything worth stealing.
When humans learned from each other, the person who shared idea got something back, reputation, influence, the compounding returns of being known. LLMs break that loop. The value concentrates in one place.
That’s a real problem. But going silent doesn’t fix it. It removes you from the pool entirely and slows you down faster than it slows anyone else.
Public sharing only works because of trust. You put your idea out there trusting that the community around it will grow or react to it. When the forest makes you doubt that, you are losing willingness to trust.
“Trust is the highest form of human motivation. It brings out the very best in people.” – Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
The author published the article, knowing it feeds the thing he’s warning about. Maybe because staying quiet, is worse for everyone, including him.
The forest needs your innovation. It also needs you to believe that sharing it is self-destruction.
That’s the actual trap. So keep building and sharing. The forest wins when you go quiet.
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This post is a response to [The Cognitive Dark Forest](https://ryelang.org/blog/posts/cognitive-dark-forest/).