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.

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.

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.

Yes, I think that’s it.

Before LLMs, the effort required to get something into a releasable state was a filter that stopped people who aren’t serious.

Amazing that we trained kids to be addicted to slot machines in video games, which companies like facebooks zynga and other companies invested a lot of money in dark patterns and manipulating people into making purchased in games. The whole industry was going into that for a while. Raid shadow ledgends was made by some dude in Israel and has connections to a slot machine manufacturer, who is also on the American gaming commission which helped nudge regulators in the right direction.

That was years ago and now we have apps that are “ai prediction markets” that let you take bets on California wild fires.

Insanity is a world where the most vulnerable people are incentivised to commit arson so they can become a millionaire for 4 months before they blow it all on a home that’s too big for them, with a car and a truck thats too much for them, and no plan to keep up this life style other than more sports betting apps, or paying for “secret” insider knowledge for kalshi. Or these idiots think that because they’re listening to the right podcasts by some CEO loser that they’re going to make the right calls, not knowing they’re the ones getting scammed.

People are so ready to have all their jobs be just a slot machine that sometimes let’s you get a output you can get paid for. Then you send your vibe coded product to your client on some kind of gig job app and they’ll take their 30% cut. So after you had bad luck on your claude slot machine who kept making you reupt your token spins, and slopjobber app (all the recent fired Xbox and meta employees will work for apps like these) took its 30% cut you are left with 6 dollars for a hour and half of work. If its anything like uber eats they will use dark patterns where the harder you work the less money you make, and all the high paying jobs go exclusively to new drivers to hook them in. Yay ai progress. Oh yeah and because its ai this is all legal now, and the states aren’t allowed to regulate Ai so fuck you bud.

Most hand-coded projects are “abandoned” within months of release, but this often happens because the project is done, not because the project outgrew the capabilities of the LLM and the vibecoder is too incompetent to fix the accrued technical debt themselves.

There is a crucial difference though, vibe coding enables people who are neither interested nor capable of understanding what is involved in maintaining a piece of software. Before vibe coding it didn’t even come to this situation: if you can’t write software you don’t need to maintain it. While there were bad coders and bad maintainers before, the numbers have now increased dramatically because everyone can pretend to be a software dev these days.

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

Well, yeah. There are lots of reasons. But basic self-interest is something we can all agree on.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.