The token trap: Why AI agents won't kill open source (and what you missed at OpenSearchCon)

David Nalley of AWS argued at OpenSearchCon India 2026 that token costs make recreating established infrastructure wasteful, so AI agents should build on proven open-source components rather than reinvent them. OpenSearch has now reached 1.7 billion downloads across 140 GitHub repositories, keeps an eight-week release cadence, and saw 16% contributor growth this year.