Hey, I’m the editor/author. I may be overexaggerating the backlash a bit, likely because I spend so much time curating content for the newsletter each week that I’m constantly exposed to the worst-of-the-worst reactions.
I don’t think you’re overexaggerating the potential backlash at all; especially on Lemmy. When I read that blurb at the top I was thinking “Bold move, Cotton…”. If you told me you get death threats over it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I’ve vibecoded a number of apps that I haven’t released for about the same reasons you describe. What I have put out have been little helpers with miniscule surface area. But the bigger ones I’ve built and am improving have been tailored to my needs (or for our group) and help immensely. At one time I could have coded them myself (maybe), but I never would have gotten around to it.
What pisses me off the most is when people come down on a FOSS maintainer that uses it to keep up with bugs and security fixes because nobody can be arsed to spend any time helping them, instead they’d rather sit on the internet and criticize other people’s methods of coping with overload.
I don’t think you’re overexaggerating the potential backlash at all; especially on Lemmy.
I don’t either, like you said, ‘especially on Lemmy.’ The thing is, AI assisted anything is unavoidable. Even in the case of longstanding, well established projects, we’re seeing AI being involved to some extent or the other. Like you, I’ve used AI to create a small handful of things for my server. One would be when I log in via SSH, there is a banner that pulls a random song from Navidrome’s playlists and displays it on the MOTD. For instance, today’s is:
🎵 SONG OF THE DAY
Blues Garage by Marco Tansini
I did make my code available here with the stipulation that it works on my machine, buyer beware, as it were. But I’d never purport to maintain it even tho I released it. For one, I don’t have the patience to wade through mounds of criticism, and requests for other options. That patience left me decades ago.
instead they’d rather sit on the internet and criticize other people’s methods of coping with overload.
Preach it! Dev toils away at creating an app. Dev releases it to the public for free with no obligations whatsoever, to even consider it. Dev gets hammered for a variety of things including AI. Go make your own app and release it to the public and see how that goes. It’s a mote/beam kind of thing.
I think some of the problem is the term vibe coding. If I want a small app to help something specific I used to look at it and go is it worth writing it for the return most of the time I was just too busy.
Now I sit down and write up a small document outlining what I want why I want it and the outcome typically I’d use AI then to review it and give any suggestions that I may not have thought of and use that for the seed for the application.
That is the document I use with an agent to actually do the code generation. I push that to a local GIT instance and the document lives with the code and then gets iterated overtime and then I typically use the issues list to add improvements and fixes to it again iterating through the issue before I think about letting an agent do it
To me vibecoding is just putting a sentence in and hoping for the best I like a little bit more structure than that.
Again, most of this is for personal use so I don’t share it widely a few friends have access to some of the stuff I’ve written because it helps them. I only ever released one AI first project on GitHub and I probably won’t go any further than that.
Hey, I’m the editor/author. I may be overexaggerating the backlash a bit, likely because I spend so much time curating content for the newsletter each week that I’m constantly exposed to the worst-of-the-worst reactions.
I don’t think you’re overexaggerating the potential backlash at all; especially on Lemmy. When I read that blurb at the top I was thinking “Bold move, Cotton…”. If you told me you get death threats over it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I’ve vibecoded a number of apps that I haven’t released for about the same reasons you describe. What I have put out have been little helpers with miniscule surface area. But the bigger ones I’ve built and am improving have been tailored to my needs (or for our group) and help immensely. At one time I could have coded them myself (maybe), but I never would have gotten around to it.
What pisses me off the most is when people come down on a FOSS maintainer that uses it to keep up with bugs and security fixes because nobody can be arsed to spend any time helping them, instead they’d rather sit on the internet and criticize other people’s methods of coping with overload.
I don’t either, like you said, ‘especially on Lemmy.’ The thing is, AI assisted anything is unavoidable. Even in the case of longstanding, well established projects, we’re seeing AI being involved to some extent or the other. Like you, I’ve used AI to create a small handful of things for my server. One would be when I log in via SSH, there is a banner that pulls a random song from Navidrome’s playlists and displays it on the MOTD. For instance, today’s is:
🎵 SONG OF THE DAY
Blues Garage by Marco Tansini
I did make my code available here with the stipulation that it works on my machine, buyer beware, as it were. But I’d never purport to maintain it even tho I released it. For one, I don’t have the patience to wade through mounds of criticism, and requests for other options. That patience left me decades ago.
Preach it! Dev toils away at creating an app. Dev releases it to the public for free with no obligations whatsoever, to even consider it. Dev gets hammered for a variety of things including AI. Go make your own app and release it to the public and see how that goes. It’s a mote/beam kind of thing.
I appreciate your candor, but do you understand why the backlash happens?
That’s fair. I’m sure we have wildly different experiences around the discussion of vibe coded projects.
I think some of the problem is the term vibe coding. If I want a small app to help something specific I used to look at it and go is it worth writing it for the return most of the time I was just too busy.
Now I sit down and write up a small document outlining what I want why I want it and the outcome typically I’d use AI then to review it and give any suggestions that I may not have thought of and use that for the seed for the application.
That is the document I use with an agent to actually do the code generation. I push that to a local GIT instance and the document lives with the code and then gets iterated overtime and then I typically use the issues list to add improvements and fixes to it again iterating through the issue before I think about letting an agent do it
To me vibecoding is just putting a sentence in and hoping for the best I like a little bit more structure than that.
Again, most of this is for personal use so I don’t share it widely a few friends have access to some of the stuff I’ve written because it helps them. I only ever released one AI first project on GitHub and I probably won’t go any further than that.
Spot on. Most engineers at companies are using LLMs nowadays but when we use it in our daily lives it becomes “vibe coded”.
I’ve started using the term agentically built or agentically driven instead.