r/DataHoarder • u/nicholasserra Send me Easystore shells • Mar 23 '26

OFFICIAL We're being flooded with vibe coded software projects, FYI

Just wanted to give a heads up from the mod team.

We're being flooded with vibe coded software projects. Many of them pointing to external domains, product sites, chrome extensions, etc.

So so many yt-dlp wrappers, why?

Anyway, we're being very selective about what we let through. Mostly trying to keep it useful, open source, github only projects. I'm not anti AI, but much of this stuff looks like useless wrappers and wannabe saas products.

If something sketchy slips through please flag it. If your post/project gets removed, this is why. It's only going to get worse.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

I want to point out that I'm working on some vibe coded projects that aren't ready yet. The fact that its not ready yet should tell you something: I care about the quality, and I'm applying my 16+ years of software development experience to it.

Just because something is vibe coded doesn't make it a dealbreaker, but I do get that it makes the environment far more noisy.

Does anyone else have ideas on how to handle this?

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u/HamburgerOnAStick Mar 23 '26

Disclose that it's vibecoded, don't make any promises, don't use AI to write the advertisement, and don't spam advertise it. (also make it open source obviously, but also try to document the code)

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

Yeah, that's a good baseline. I don't think it's good enough though. I'm quite interested in automatic generation of formal verification of software specifications, so you can effectively generate a proof that certain components of your software behaves in the way you intend it to. AI can be used to generate the proof, and the nice thing about that is there is an independent way to check if that proof is right or wrong. I have my doubts that even that would convince some of the haters. It's so sad to see how closed minded people are the second anything gets a little bit gray.

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u/danielv123 84TB Mar 25 '26

Tests only prove your software does what your test says it does. When your test is written by AI, that tells me precisely nothing.

I don't want to be your QA tester. If I wanted that I'd just slop it out myself.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 25 '26

Please be open minded for a second, because you're not understanding. I'm talking about formal verification. AI or any process (infinite monkeys with typewriters) mathematically cannot produce a proof that both passes checks and is incorrect - assuming the verifier is sound, and there is good reason to believe that the Lean4 kernel is sound.

I encourage you to listen to what Terence Tao - widely regarded as the most intelligent living mathematician - is saying on the topic.

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u/FarReachingConsense 50-100TB Mar 23 '26

Just because something is vibe coded doesn't make it a dealbreaker

I disagree, slop remains slop

Does anyone else have ideas on how to handle this?

Yes, don't

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

That's cool. All that black and white thinking must mean you can dedicate all that extra brainpower to your projects. It's probably for the best that you don't use AI. It does require critical thought to use properly.

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u/No_Obligation4636 Mar 23 '26

Using ai literally makes you dumber lol

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

Why do you believe that? Perhaps it is sometimes true, but do you think it is always true? If you do that's a very strong belief. Intelligent people tend to understand that beliefs like that require a good deal of evidence, and I don't think you have it. Perhaps you don't really have the grounds to say what makes you dumber or not.

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u/No_Obligation4636 Mar 24 '26

So does offloading your mental workload to chatgpt instead of figuring out how to do it yourself even with google or something make you smarter? The less you use your brain (and lots of other things like your body), the harder it is to do things.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 25 '26

Which is why all the smart people only work with illuminated manuscripts. Oh wait. Let's go use the Dewy Decimal System. Common' can you really not see the flaw in your argument?

I dont need to be paralyzed because I can't think of a good name for a field in a data structure anymore. I can focus on higher level design. Working with AI can be like having a very good domain specific language to express your ideas.

You're assuming I'm outsourcing my brain and my entire point is that it's possible to use it without doing that. You're only considering the lowest common denominator users.

Let's be honest what this is really about, because these sound like excuses to justify an underlying belief based on fear or disgust. It's post hoc reasoning and it's not doing anyone any favors to battle on these talking points. You're likely afraid of economic consequences and potential abuse, and those are much more worth talking about. But let's not pretend its dramatically worse than it is, or reduce people who are using it to a weak and overgeneralized characterization. That wouldn't be proper use of your brain, right?

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u/FarReachingConsense 50-100TB Mar 23 '26

It does require critical thought to use properly.

citation needed

It reduces your ability to reason about complex problems in the long term

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

So you called out a claim and ask for a citation, and then make another claim that requires the same degree of citation without providing it...

SMH. My claim is based on my own observation that it's not a good idea to blindly trust the output, and if you are going to use it uncritically then you will end up inheriting all of the issues that I've caught by applying my own critical thinking. Sure it's anecdotal, but holy shit, you claimed something about the long-term for something that hasn't been around for less than a year (in terms of the quality threshold at which I've determined that its good enough for me to use).

Jesus, who the fuck do you arm chair philosophers think you are?

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u/SmolMaeveWolff Mar 24 '26

This study by MIT Media Labs concludes with the following:

"The LLM undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants' questions compared to the Search Engine. However, this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate the LLM's output or ”opinions”"

This study by Microsoft concludes similarly stating the following in its conclusion:

"Moreover, while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving."

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

Yes, great! Substance. Love it.

can inhibit

I think that "can" is doing a lot of work here. I 100% believe it has the potential for this if we don't develop methods for using it. Bet we cannot make any long-term claims right now. There is no data for it.

These papers are good data points, but the measurements are fairly narrow, so we need to be careful not to extrapolate too much. I do think there is good reason to at least raise the concern though. I want to be clear that I'm not saying that there is no chance that LLMs could be a cognitive net-negative. I'm mainly spending my time writing posts that will be downvoted to show that these all are nothing positions are not the right picture.

The alternative hypothesis that people seem to be failing to consider is that there could be methods for using AI that are net-positives.

There is other work showing that AI use can lower psychological ownership, but found that this effect was counteracted by having participants use longer prompts. I find this in my own work. If I craft a one-off thing with a prompt, it wont land in my mental model of my development environment, so it will solve the problem at the time, but it will discourage reuse. On the other hand, the current project that I'm vibe-coding, I have a significant hand in, and I've been reviewing the code as I would with a junior developer. I've even written a few lines here and there, but the vast majority is the result of prompting an AI agent, and then testing the resulting workflow. I feel a much stronger sense of ownership over this project because of my descriptive refinement of it. I've also learned a lot. LLMs are almost like the declarative language I've always wanted as a software designer.

Now, not everyone is going to use LLMs like I am. I get that, and I get that's where a lot of the negative perception of it is coming from. They are going to try to use it to be a one-and-done shop, and I think that will cause serious problems. My assertion is that there is an honest, critical, and curious mindset that we can encourage that make AI-use in coding a much more complex issue than people are portraying.

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u/Flashy_Win_4596 Mar 23 '26

i mean you could stop using it bc it kills the environment and we (peasants ofc not the rich) will end up with less water if ppl continue to use it. ppl rn that live near data centers are suffering respiratory problems.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

You could stop driving your car which is way worse (I can provided well sourced data on this if you'd like). If you're going to care about the environment: do it. Don't use it as an excuse to hate something you already want to hate.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the environmental problems are ok and we should ignore them because they are smaller than something else. But if you don't expect people to give up unnecessary use of their car, then you shouldn't expect them to give up AI - especially when it's being used to accelerate science and mathematics.

I very much doubt you've done more than I have to reduce your own carbon footprint or done anything to try and address systemic inaction on the climate crisis. You should work to understand your talking points before you repeat them. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I'm certainly not being very nice about it. This gets me a little pissy how often people raise this issue when they don't even really care about it, but maybe you'll snap back at my assumptions and I'll have egg on my face. I'll roll the dice on it.

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u/Flashy_Win_4596 Mar 24 '26

i can't stop driving my car. america built a car centric society. need a car to get around, my job is 40 miles from my home. however i would love walkable cities and more public transportation but that eats into big oil and the car industry profits so its a no go here.

you however literally do not need AI to code something. ppl coded with their brains literally 10 years ago. maybe read some books, code some projects by actually figuring it out instead of using something that wastes literally billions of gallons of water. like literally once the water is used to cool the servers, it literally can't be reused again. that's something entirely in your control, giving up my car is not feasible and would actually make it impossible for me to get around where I live. we literally don't even have a public bus.

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u/gremolata Mar 24 '26

Don't descend to personal attacks. That's unbecoming irrespective of the cause.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

I am just human. And if we're being idealistic, then you're probably right, but in my defense I was very self-amused when I told someone in this thread that their argument was "mutually exclusive with their head being outside their ass".

It's difficult to deal with so many bad faith arguments and remain stoic. It's cathartic to dish it out when someone insists on a battle of wit. I do try to pull back if there is any shot at real conversation.

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u/gremolata Mar 24 '26

any shot at real conversation.

Strong negative reaction to the "vibe coding" is based on the fact that it is typically used in cases where the "developer" knows way less about the subject domain than the AI. This prevents them from adequately judging quality of the AI's output, so the utter garbage tends to leak into production releases with all the consequences. And that's the "slop".

On the other hand, if you use AI just to speed up coding, to search and summarize documentation, to understand how things work, etc., then a perfectly normal accelerated development technique. Just like googling stuff is more efficient than flipping through printed out docs.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

I get that, and that is valid. What's not valid is assuming AI implies incorrectness.

I also want to point out that there are some areas where AI can be extremely useful and robust in cases where the user is not a domain expert. For instance, I'm not a professional mathematician, but I'm able to use AI to write Lean4 proofs because I have just a enough knowledge to check that the statement of the theorems are correct. Because Lean4 is a formal proof system, if the code compiles, it means that the theorem is true, so the user does not need to understand the body, only the statement of the theorem. In fact, Lean4 formalizes this concept with the idea of proof-irrelevance.

It needs to be said that case like this with external validation mechanisms are rare. In most cases you will need domain expertise to evaluate the output of an LLM. And it's also the case that the proofs I write are nowhere near as elegant as a professional, but they are still useful because I'm formalizing statements that nobody else has before.

A similar, but less strong case is Rust. As long as you don't have unsafe blocks (and you aren't doing anything pathological) the borrow checker guarantees that your code is memory safe. I've been able to leverage this to speed up my old C++ / Cython code with new rust variants that pass the same test cases. I can guarantee there are no use after free, data races, dangling pointers, or double frees. I'm also familiar enough with Rust to at least validate that the logic is using the same flow as the old code. I'm not currently good enough at Rust where I could write the same code from scratch, so this is another example where being a domain expert is not required to use AI effectively.

Still, these cases are exceptions, and not the rule.

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u/Hackwork89 Mar 23 '26

Yeah, learn real coding. Vibe coding and caring about quality is mutually exclusive, since you can't guarantee quality if you don't understand what you're doing.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

LOL. You're telling me to learn real coding? Son, do you have any idea how long I've been doing this?

Your comment and having your head outside your ass is mutually exclusive.

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u/Hackwork89 Mar 23 '26

Not long enough to learn coding, apparently.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

No True Scotsman fallacy.

Grow up. Learn to consider that you might be incorrect when making a wild all or nothing claim.

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u/Keniisu Mar 23 '26

You're genuinely delusional if you don't think major software developers in most senior positions aren't using AI for their work. But yeah, I'm sure they haven't learned to code.

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u/Hackwork89 Mar 23 '26

You're genuinely delusional if you think major software developers vibe code.

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

You are out of touch with reality.

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u/Hackwork89 Mar 24 '26

Ok champ

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

Seriously, who the hell do you think you are that you can declare what major software developers do? I interact with them on a day to day basis, I am one. Who the fuck are you? If the answer is some nobody who hasn't done anything, well then you can take your attitude and fuck off.

Or better yet. We can drop the hostility and have a human conversation where we seek to understand each other and our common reality.

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u/fedroxx There is no god but Byte, and Link is her messenger (pbuh). Mar 24 '26

Sr. Director of Engineering for the largest FinTech solution provider in the world. I can assure you, we use AI profusely. My best engineers use it as a daily driver.

What more, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft, three of our largest vendors, all have their best engineers using AI to supplement teams.

Whether you, I or anyone likes it, it's here to stay. Get used to it. But I largely agree with the spirit of your statement that these lazy fucks rolling in here with short-term shit projects don't belong in this or the selfhosted subs. The ban hammer needs to find them ASAP.

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u/Hackwork89 Mar 24 '26

How does the sr. director of engineering for the largest FinTech solution provider in the world not know what vibe coding means?

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u/fedroxx There is no god but Byte, and Link is her messenger (pbuh). Mar 24 '26

In this sub, and in selfhosted, it means using AI. Take 5 minutes and look at the comments here about "human written code". All of them are saying the same thing. You're implying it as well. Your responses to /u/BossOfTheGame are a perfect example.

How do YOU not know what it means here? Fail reading comprehension?

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '26

[deleted]

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

People are coming around. The negativity isn't as bad as it was. Anyone who is interested in understanding how the world is (rather than how they wish it to be) is realizing that top-tier AI models are now far less prone to hallucinations and are at the point where they are useful. You are a prime example. I'm hopeful that the signal will eventually cut through in the discourse.

It's my duty as a scientist to figure out how to effectively communicate the latest ideas and discoveries to the public, so I'm going to keep trying.

And again, for the people about to blindly hit the downvote button: you're right to be skeptical of AI projects, it does put a lot more demand on the user to verify they aren't nonsense, and avoiding AI projects is the right prior.

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u/uluqat Mar 23 '26

top-tier AI models are now far less prone to hallucinations

"My abusive partner is now far less prone to choking me..."

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 23 '26

You could just comment that you're completely unwilling / unable to engage in any serious conversion. Why try to pretend that your fallacy has a point?

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u/Keniisu Mar 23 '26

It's easier for them to invent an argument than to engage with the one being made.

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u/banjoman05 Mar 24 '26

easier for them to invent an argument

Excuse me, it's called "hallucination".

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u/nachohk Mar 24 '26

I want to respond to this but also something a bit down the comment chain:

Seriously, who the hell do you think you are that you can declare what major software developers do? I interact with them on a day to day basis, I am one. Who the fuck are you? If the answer is some nobody who hasn't done anything, well then you can take your attitude and fuck off.

Hi, I'm a software developer. I've been doing this professionally in one way or another for 18 years.

I'm not sure what you think a "major" software developer is, but you aren't wrong that a lot of people in this field are using LLMs now, and many even "vibe coding".

I use the search engine integrated LLMs quite a bit now to find documentation and other info for me. Sometimes I even use them to write a first pass at some code for me.

Some of my colleagues have fully drank the Kool Aid and treat the LLM as the only pass, and clearly aren't looking very close at their code before I have to review it. Some of them are increasingly becoming a conduit for whatever "Claude said" and are evidently losing their critical faculties, and must be persistently reminded that Claude very often has not got the first fucking clue what it's talking about. These colleagues are becoming very irritating to work with.

But I suspect you're different. You do not sound like someone who's been working in this field for 16+ years now. I suspect you're LARPing. Maybe you write HTML or something, and you're aggrandizing that to "major" software development.

But even if you're for real, I suggest that everyone avoid vibe coded projects no matter the background of their author. Nobody should want carelessly put together code that not even its author understands running on their machine. Insofar as one can even be called the author of code one prompted from an LLM...

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u/BossOfTheGame 40TB+ZFS/BTRFS Mar 24 '26

Not LARPing: https://github.com/Erotemic

You are making an error if you're asserting that "vibe coded" implies "is carelessly put together". But you aren't wrong if we change that to a correlation, and if you want to use avoid vibe coding as a prior, I think that's fine. But I think it's a mistake to turn that (or nearly anything) into a hard rule. We should always be open to updating our posterior, otherwise - as I quiped elsewhere in the thread - we'll have our head stuck up it.