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.