That is so accurate. I have a couple of LLM-coded applications running, either because a solution wasn’t available, or existing solutions were beyond the scope of what I need, and would idle at up to 1 GB of RAM instead of 10 MB. In situations like these, being able to get a quick solution thrown together is such a boon.

I think I agree. I have a few self projects I’ve vibe coded and used a few months that I’ve considered putting out there open source and if folks wanna try cool if not whatever…but that’s probably how all of those dead projects start. I’m even hosting them on my own private Gitea and updating via Obtanium because I don’t want to bother anyone lmao. Wait crap Google is gonna stop me from doing this in a couple months huh

I agree that people cannot vibe code well unless they are a developer. Knowing the difference between slop and using a tool to automate bulk writing code is crucial at the current state. And I don’t ever know if it’ll get better because you need to know why you want to build something someway.

Disagree. It’s perfectly viable. I’ve maintained several projects for over a year myself

Are there any obvious signs of it being vibe coded that I’m missing?

In my experience, projects not being very active, especially small ones by a single person, isn’t anything new that has much to do with LLMs, it was always that way for hobby projects. And it was inactive for only about a month now, with the author replying within one day before that. I have a few hobby projects myself and don’t reserve time every month to work on them or check on their repos.

Seems like your PR was merged by the creator? If you are mad that the creator isn’t doing anything with THEIR OWN project, fork it and fix it yourself… No need to get pissy and make a full complaint post in here about it.

Also it’s again the false sense of security pf “if you don’t use vibed apps you’ll be fine”, making people forget basic security procedures.

I, for instance, had a service vulnerable and discontinued without noticing for months. It was something 100% made before LLM was a thing. Still had unpatched vulnerabilities and the project was abandoned. It was my fault for not checking more often is the services I host are safe or not.

I would guess that the key difference is that vibe coded apps can get to a more or less working state a lot quicker, while other apps are likely to be abandoned before it’s done.

Though in either case I’d always be careful with new projects. If it’s just a single guy that’s been working on something for less than a year and only have a handful of GitHub stars, I probably wouldn’t install it.

On the flip side, if you’re vibe coding an app you should seriously consider whether it’s something you want to open source or make available publicly. There’s a social contract that comes with that.

This is the attitude of an existing programmer who is using these tools. What I’ve found on here is a specific pattern that keeps repeating:

1. A post is sharing/advertising a project. The poster is two hours old.
2. The poster is extremely coy about how their project was made despite obvious slop in the post body. They’re a bit clueless about anything that looks like a social contract that comes with that and think there’s something strange or accusatory/interrogatory when people ask questions they think are too difficult or technical
3. Some Lemmy users have generally polite but fundamental critiques and questions the poster can’t answer or thinks must be gotchas
4. The poster has a crash out about us all being mean/unappeasable/anti-AI/luddites/Linux users/godless commies and is usually the only one downvoting comments, even ones that read like genuinely interested, though cautious
5. The post and account are deleted

There’s a clear disconnect. You’re talking about the homelab community which is a bit different but I specifically remember someone making an accessible Android UI and being extremely frustrated at people asking for the entire code to be released, and at people saying there’s not enough features there for that poster to be looping in advertisements on a fucking home page UI.

I get the impression that primarily-slop coders on some level think they’re doing programming, because of how you can get functional prototypes of code that is way above what a total beginner can write on their own. They think having code that compiles (whatever it’s usually Python there’s no compiling) means the hard part is over. They don’t seem to understand that the questions and concerns about vibe coding aren’t moral complaints but genuine concerns about liability, running code even the author doesn’t understand, and a complete cluelessness about what they should be doing to evaluate the code besides prompting it to be “good with no mistakes”.

That Android UI project seemed like a little thing a few people could install on their grandparents’ phones. It’s normal for the author not to understand every little thing. But being totally clueless and being offended at the suggestion, being entitled to put ads in it to get 0.0016 USD per year per grandma in exchange for taking up a quarter of her screen forever, not understanding why this looks scummy, why refusing to release 60% of the code looks scummy, why half the questions are being asked at all.

Again this would not be a problem if this wasn’t now expected for a significant portion of any projects you find online. A lot of projects are the first genuine effort of someone out there and they’re not perfect but they didn’t feel like the unceremonious implosion of the entire philosophical concept of personal computing.

And I’m fucking shit at writing good code and I’m pissed.

Just to nit pick (though maybe not) is there a social contract? That usually implies in exchange for X, you get Y.

If the thing is provided as FOSS, what does the dev get, contract wise?

Isn’t that how we end up with devs walking away entirely due to “I downloaded your project, you owe me xyz, you fuck”? I’ve seen that happen more than once and it’s a real factor in projects being abandoned, even before slopcode.

Speaking for myself only: when I share something, it’s usually something I made for myself that I think others might enjoy or find useful.

As the dev, I’m happy to look at suggestions or reports, with no guarantee that your idea will be implemented. If it is, I credit it and you.

I also refuse PRs, because if I am developing for me and sharing, then I’m not developing a product for sale to spec or running a democracy. I don’t know you, you don’t know me and you likely don’t know what the long term road map or invariant constraints are, so I’d rather just not. I realise that’s not a commonly held position but it’s in the same “limited time” category.

I’m happy for you to fork it, ask questions and spin up your own tho - that’s why I like AGPL-3.

Between all that, I’ve been able to avoid the excesses of both sides but YMMV.

Yeah same. I make loads of little things to bodge my own problems but would never be moronic enough to try and capitalise on something that took 60mins to make.

but without the actual will and motivation to keep supporting that software to pump out software and publish it.

TBH, most software will never be used my many so needs no support. Also, I think lack of long-term support is not the same kind of problem. It used to be any more. Back in the day when the original author dropped support it was a major investment to get someone else up to speed. Now fixes and enhancements can be done by LLMs as well, given a somehwat competent software developer.

But in general: The newer the project and the more bells and whistles it has, the less I personally would want to make it an essential piece of my workflow.

Isn’t that no different than the millions of open source projects that have few authors, little interest and are abandoned for the next shiny thing? At least in my mind with the current state of LLMs, if there is an open source project that you want to update for yourself, you should be able to do that pretty easily.

There was a Ted Talk a while back (I can’t remember who) where they said “I have always wanted to give a Ted Talk… but when I got selected to do this I realized that what I really wanted was to say I had given a Ted Talk”. Meaning they want to be known as someone who had given a Ted Talk, not actually go through the process of writing and delivering the Talk.

People who write open source code do it because they like the process of writing, just like an author enjoys writing books. LLMs are for people who just want to be able to say they have written a book. People who slop-code aren’t actually interested in learning how to code. Which is a fine toy for them to play with, but not sustainable (or reliable for others to use).

Usually these tools are very basic.

If you read this community in the last weeks you’d know that slopcoders don’t stop at basic projects.

I don’t disagree necessarily, but they shouldn’t be uploading / sharing one-off projects they don’t intent to maintain.

I thought vaporware was announced or promised code that never materializes, or shows up much later than claimed. Often used by big companies to squash competition, who typically have very real solutions available.

I expect this gap will be filled by cheaper models like GLM as they catch up to frontier models in their capabilities.

Yeah, but OTOH, do we cheer for centralisation of technology for thems that can affords to pay?

Replying to this post with an AI slop comment takes some balls, mate