This is the way, LLMs are an enabler and force multiplier to help you build whatever interface you want on whatever protocol you have to reverse engineer.

Provide it the official client and point it at public api endpoints, set it to work to reimplement.

Ahem there is also the option to check out competitors ;)

Discord says using modified or alternative clients is against their terms of service, and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

They're not exactly friendly to that sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they add some traps to catch people making their own client.

So I'd +1 the sibling comment's suggestion to consider alternatives to Discord, if you're setting up your own community

So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

> So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...

> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.

Since discord announced that they would be scanning ID a lot of alternatives have sprung up, chatto and Armada are both looking promising as alternatives, plus the chatto vibed marketing materials on their Dev chat gave me a laugh the other week!

I can recommend both Matrix and Discourse forum as excellent open source selfhostable alternatives.

I like matrix, its like the new IRC for almost real time developer chat, I also do this via Discord but I'd prefer an open alternative. If you have experience running a matrix server do you find the data storage an issue? It sounded like if you federate and join the bigger channels you can balloon your storage pretty fast.

I mostly host for myself and a couple friends, so data storage hasn't been an issue. I'm sure at some point I may need to prune the attachment store, but I put it on a spinning HDD so capacity isn't an issue. (You can rent a storage VPS and those tend to have oodles of disk space.)

Take a look at Chatto. https://chatto.run/

FLOSS, easy to self host, and works nicely.

There are literally dozens of open-source Discord clients already, both vibe-coded and not; and have been for many years. Nobody needed to prove this was possible, least of all Discord.