How do you price a legal chatbot?

177K monthly downloads. Top 10% of 700K packages. Zero revenue, one maintainer, weekend work. Here's what "success" actually means for open source maintainers—and what I'd tell anyone considering building their own tools.

I sat in a standing-room-only prompt engineering workshop feeling anxious—not because I was behind, but because I don't use any of these frameworks. Turns out my instinct was right. That same month, the technology shifted from prompts to persistent agent skills

This Hacktoberfest, I'm not contributing code—I'm maintaining my own. Two years after redlines went viral, I'm adapting it for AI agents. The lesson: tools that don't work with AI will fade. Open source needs to evolve with how people actually work.

A new term is making headlines: "workslop"—AI-generated work that looks polished but lacks substance. Research found 40% of workers encountered it last month, costing $186 per employee in cleanup time. For resource-constrained lawyers, you can't spend time fixing what's irretrievably broken.