News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by paxys on Monday June 02, 2025 @09:47AM (#44158812)
AI coding tools have really turned me off from engaging with the vast majority of startups and personal projects online. It used to be that people who had the skills and dedication to launch something of their own could generally be trusted to follow security best practices and be careful with user data, sometimes even more so than large companies. Now it's more likely that someone with marginal technical skills is "vibe coding" to try and make a quick buck.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by Cheer2171 on Monday June 02, 2025 @10:01AM (#44158960)
Completely false about personal projects. The median github repo was crap long before genai. The superstar open source libraries often have high quality, but it is a steep cliff after that. Anybody can push to pypi or npm and I've seen so much crap there too that I was tempted to install after a search, until I looked into the code. That's what genai is trained on.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by jrvieira on Monday June 02, 2025 @12:07PM (#44160287)
I suspect it's a long way from what it's meant here by "online personal projects i can interact with" and "median github/pypy/npm crap".

Speaking for myself, I remember a time when personal ("indy") projects had the reputation of being better cared for than big company products before online repositories were even a thing.

Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by EdwardKrayer on Monday June 02, 2025 @10:42PM (#44165756)
Can you give some examples? Because personally, I don't remember any period where personal projects weren't normally hacked together, but my experience only goes back to the early 2000s. It would be interesting to hear your memories of it.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by jrvieira on Tuesday June 03, 2025 @09:08AM (#44169636)
I'm not alone in this and we don't need to go much further back than the early '00s! Great time to sample from.

I had a Mac at the time so here's some from the top of my head that I remember being very popular: Quicksilver and LaunchBar, NetNewsWire, Coda and Transmit (anything from Panic, really), Growl, AudioHijack and Soundflower, Unarchiver, iA Writer... these were insanely well crafted apps with no real competition from big companies in that regard.

Apple infamously capitalized on this indy development phenomenon with the creation of the AppStore model in 2008, first on the iPhone and later on the Mac.

Outside of this ecosystem I can remember WinAmp, Total Commander, WinRar, 7-zip, VLC, Foobar, mIRC, Paint.NET, μTorrent, FileZilla, Reaper, SublimeText...

Macromedia was a medium sized company with huge global success for their size, and they had some of the best software out there at the time before their acquisition. Adobe immediately polluted it.

Thoughtful, ad-free, bloat free, passion-driven software with attention to detail, good design and great performance was an attribute of small independent teams, not big software companies.

Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by warkdarrior on Monday June 09, 2025 @05:22PM (#44229660)
These are all examples from 20 years ago. Anything more recent?
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by cchance on Monday June 02, 2025 @01:42PM (#44161246)
I mean thats also the case for enterprise software, shit banks have breaches every couple months lol
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by arrowsmith on Monday June 02, 2025 @12:08PM (#44160292)
> It used to be that people who had the skills and dedication to launch something of their own could generally be trusted to follow security best practices and be careful with user data

Did it? I'm not so sure.

Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by mystified5016 on Monday June 02, 2025 @07:50PM (#44164638)
That might have been closer to the truth in the 90s, but certainly not since the SWE gold rush
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by Rendello on Monday June 02, 2025 @12:34PM (#44160542)
It's put me off sharing my code online. Having a project forked is one thing, having someone "vibe coding" my code verbatim and thinking they did it themselves is another.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by herodotuscat on Monday June 02, 2025 @09:15PM (#44165239)
Yep. I don't even put code that's related to business in private github repos any more; everything goes in a private git forge running on a NUC in my office.
Re:"I vibe coded and shipped an app in three days. It got ha... by Rendello on Monday June 02, 2025 @10:13PM (#44165581)
I'm moving my new private repos off Github too, I don't trust Microsoft not to train LLMs on it.