Why Open Source Projects Are Moving Test Suites to Private Repos

As AI models become increasingly proficient at writing code from detailed specifications, automated tests have become more valuable than ever. In effect, a comprehensive test suite acts as an executable specification of a program’s desired behavior.

Because of this, open source projects with commercial business models are realizing their codebases can easily be rewritten and re-licensed by competitors using LLMs guided by their test suites. In response, projects like tldraw are beginning to move their test cases to private repositories. It’s a fascinating shift in how we think about software engineering assets and open source licensing in an AI world.