Bo OsinupebiI have always preferred the bazaar approach to building software over the cathedral. Eric S. Raymond wrote about this distinction decades ago, and I think it is becoming even more relevant in the age of AI.
I have never particularly liked gatekeepers or the idea of a select group appointing themselves arbiters of what constitutes good software. Give me a marketplace of competing ideas, approaches and implementations, with correctness established through rigorous, independently verifiable guarantees.
Formal verification, executable specifications, invariants and automated testing should increasingly replace subjective judgments about who is qualified to build or whose implementation deserves approval. The goal is not to eliminate standards. It is to make them explicit, reproducible and independent of authority.
I would rather have a thousand competing implementations subjected to rigorous verification than a handful of approved opinions determining what gets built.
The cathedral asks who is qualified to build. The bazaar asks what can be demonstrated to be correct.