This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.
@rimu@piefed.social given the new post tag requirements, please edit your title to include [AIT].
My coworker said it best: “Anyone can build an app now, but nobody wants to maintain one.”
I shall share a personal experience and opinion, I’m telling y’all early so you can skip it if you want.
I finished several projects with AI assisting me in my work. As someone who has masters degree in AI (done before current AI craze) I really wanted to see the new thing in action, even though I knew it was over-advertised and over-hyped.
AI is a good tool for a programmer in the same sense as Google Search is a good tool for a programmer. And just like haphazardly copying code from stackoverflow doesn’t make you a good programmer, neither does AI. Anyone who tries to either have agentic AI write everything for him, or just copies code from LLM will eventually end up with confusing mess that even experienced programmers will have hard time to work with.
AI is good for quick questions - what is the data type, what is syntax here and there, what library provides specific feature… but terrible at making, expanding and managing large projects. Few years back I would tell my peers “just google it, you will get better results” but sadly Google Search entered such a terrible enshittification phase even before AI craze, that in my personal experience it’s faster and more accurate to ask LLM most coding questions.
Purely vibe coded apps are abandoned because the proper answer to “can a vibe coder add feature X to his app” is sadly and expectedly “fuck you”. My current project - Baba Yaga was created with AI assist, by treating AI like Google Search and occasionally as a junior dev to re-write boring parts (that could have been done with a script probably). If all LLMs got shut down tomorrow, my workflow would barely change, I would just start complaining about current state of Google Search a bit more.
Thank you for Baba Yaga, anything starring Baba Yaga gets my full endorsement. (I can fix her, I just know it!)
It’s an esoteric knowledge and tools app. My wife loves esoteric stuff so I combed through several old alamachs on magic to build this.
Not many people know that “Baba Yaga” is the real name of the song, not “Teenage Wasteland”.
I would say that the free tiers of those coding tools got cut back so much, that some of those slop coded stuff wouldn’t keep doing it any more.
Claude is on a 5 hr timer, and you get very few responses. Qeen Code was free for a second, that was nice.
Speaking from my own slop coded project viewpoint.Yeah, but OTOH, do we cheer for centralisation of technology for thems that can affords to pay?
Locally run models are available for free. My laptop can run a tiny model 1.8b, so it’s useless, and the family gaming pc could use some smaller side medium ones like 8-10b ones.
Right now the bubble is still insane, but I believe the it population will able to afford better chips in couple of years.Maybe but right now, according to the Steam hardware survey, the most commonly owned VRAM tier is 8GB - sitting at around 27% of surveyed systems, with 16GB closing the gap fast.
Even with MoE and llama.cpp tricks, you’re not running frontier anything at decent context length without significant fiddling on that - it’s possible on 8GB but you’re operating with almost no headroom, 16GB might let you scrape by with a Q4 quant MoE.
The very best local coding models (arguably the Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B MoE or Qwen 3.6-27B) need 16-17GB at Q4 quantisation, and building a system from scratch to run one is probably a $3.5K proposition. With the cost of living crisis hitting everywhere, that means the table ante gear is beyond the reach of many. Even a decent GPU is north of $1K in many local markets.
I adore small LLMs, and know a lot of tricks to leverage them, but 14B is the bare minimum for what I would start to consider competent.
We’re boned until 2030ish, when gear gets cheaper (allegedly).
Part of me thinks there’s a dark conspiracy at play here. Give people affordable access to frontier LLMs, make self hosting hardware cost prohibitive, then jack up subscription prices.
I think there’s a way out of that mess, but it needs people to stop chasing “bigger, better” and start chasing “actually, how can I use what I have to do X instead of needing bigger and better?” but that needs talented devs and a mind shift.
ICBW and YMMV.
2030 is only a couple years away ;).
IMHO, $4-5k for a computer that can code as much you want is a bargain. If you have a product that will sell.
Conspiracy is right, the bubble is real and they will keep it pumping til it burst. Llms are not the second coming. They are great tools, but they are not solution for everything.
This economical milestone will be really “interesting” in the next 10 years. Interesting as the Chinese curse for wishing you interesting life.That assumes prices actually come down.
On purely dollar costs, $5K for a coding / AI only PC doesn’t amortise vs subscription or API access. Not for occasional shenanigans anyways.
I’ve done the calcs, because I wanted to justify the indulgence and the numbers dont stack up. Yet.
Of course, I based that on current rates. If basic subs go to $50/month, exclude coding agents, and API skyrockets…well fuck, I’ll go back to modding and retro gaming. I still remember how to code in ARexx, BlitzBasic etc and I keep threatening to make an Amiga or C64 stuff…there are other rabbit holes :)
PS: Lemmy spying on me; YouTube just recommended this
I expect this gap will be filled by cheaper models like GLM as they catch up to frontier models in their capabilities.
I believe they will catch up in no time.
But not every one will be able to pay anything for them.
I’m not paying because it is a hobby project (a huge one) and it is totally free with optional donations. That’s not much ROI.
The only slop worth using is slop you make for yourself.
I think I agree. I have a few self projects I’ve vibe coded and used a few months that I’ve considered putting out there open source and if folks wanna try cool if not whatever…but that’s probably how all of those dead projects start. I’m even hosting them on my own private Gitea and updating via Obtanium because I don’t want to bother anyone lmao. Wait crap Google is gonna stop me from doing this in a couple months huh
That is so accurate. I have a couple of LLM-coded applications running, either because a solution wasn’t available, or existing solutions were beyond the scope of what I need, and would idle at up to 1 GB of RAM instead of 10 MB. In situations like these, being able to get a quick solution thrown together is such a boon.
Can confirm, am running a lot of services on a VPS that make my life more convenient. I prompt from my phone and get useful stuff out. I am a software engineer, so I can course correct ir when necessary. I only use opencode for this, not Hermes or Openclaw
As Linus Torvalds said, give the compiler some credit.
I made the mistake of installing Starling recently, not realizing how it was made. I contributed a PR to it, write a few issues describing the bugs, and since then there’s been absolutely no activity from the creator.
That’s fine, they are under no obligation to work for free. But I wouldn’t have installed it if I knew it was abandonware.
Seems like your PR was merged by the creator? If you are mad that the creator isn’t doing anything with THEIR OWN project, fork it and fix it yourself… No need to get pissy and make a full complaint post in here about it.
It doesn’t sound like OP is mad at the creator, but annoyed at the increased number of projects that are abandoned
It’s hard to judge the longevity of a project, and LLMs can make a project look more stable and professional than it is. It’s fair to feel annoyed if you mess up that call and move your workflow to something that gets abandoned.
No one got “mad” or “pissy” or filed a complaint. I feel they they were very explicit that it was not a complaint.
Disagreed. You should blast and air everyone’s embarassing trash as loud as possible so no one misses it.
Are there any obvious signs of it being vibe coded that I’m missing?
In my experience, projects not being very active, especially small ones by a single person, isn’t anything new that has much to do with LLMs, it was always that way for hobby projects. And it was inactive for only about a month now, with the author replying within one day before that. I have a few hobby projects myself and don’t reserve time every month to work on them or check on their repos.
No obvious signs, nope. It wasn’t until I started using it in earnest that I got suspicious and then when trying to work on the code it became very clear.
This in my experience is the hallmark of a vibe coded project. Individual pieces of code can be perfectly fine, but when you zoom out into an overall structure things get weird. Design patterns changing, same/similar problems solved in different, sometimes conflicting ways.
Been working on a project like that at work. Initially I enjoyed the change of pace, but as I realised that there’s no coherence at all in the project structure my joy turned into frustration.
To me, the most frustrating thing is that you can’t ask someone why something is done in a particular way, because no decision was ever made because no one was there to make a decision. Things just happened.
If you have access to their git, watch out for the commit history. Check how much code each commit is introducing and/or editing and how fast they are, and how many times these big commits happen.
If you see a project with big commits in very short interval of times, it’s a sign that it was vibe coded
Hardly an issue with generated code. You could say the same about projects before LLMs were widely used for code generation: “most projects are abandoned within months of release”. The difference now is the scale and how some people feel about it.
There is a crucial difference though, vibe coding enables people who are neither interested nor capable of understanding what is involved in maintaining a piece of software. Before vibe coding it didn’t even come to this situation: if you can’t write software you don’t need to maintain it. While there were bad coders and bad maintainers before, the numbers have now increased dramatically because everyone can pretend to be a software dev these days.
Most hand-coded projects are “abandoned” within months of release, but this often happens because the project is done, not because the project outgrew the capabilities of the LLM and the vibecoder is too incompetent to fix the accrued technical debt themselves.
Nah, most projects where just abandoned. Most projects never reached maturity and where abandoed in like weeks if not days. Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever. LLM’s just removed the hurdle to start something “simple” so now the problem just grew in size.
Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever.
Plenty, possibly most, of those do exactly what they were built to do and nothing more or less. I have a couple of dozen such repos myself.
Hmm, I think we are running both on assumptions. This would need some data to be analyzed to actually have a clear picture.
Disagree. Most projects are never “done”. Whether that is defined by the user or by the users, there are nearly always things to work on. Maintainers just lose interest or don’t bother. This is as old as open source and it has nothing to do with LLMs, it’s only aggravated by it.
Some people want to be programmers. We enjoy the process.
These people just want attention. Or have been conned into the idea that with AI everything is easy.
these are people who “have an idea for an app” that pester devs to build their dumbass ideas.
It’s more like they want a portfolio to sell at an interview, and since entry-level hires are getting pinched by AI, they’re screwed either way
For me, it’s been super helpful to write personalized things quickly that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Are these things I plan on maintaining for decades? Hell no. But there is no current solution, this isn’t a commercial product, and I always have the code in case I want to make adjustments in the future.
Easy come, easy go
In a shock to absolutely not a single person who has had to “hand craft” and maintain code… Its hard enough maintaining shit you wrote last week let alone adapting or collaborating on stuff you didn’t.
… so people who shit out recycled code from other people passed through a randomization algo are totally lost from step one. And easy come… easy go.
Oh I need to maintain this? Oh the magic box can’t do it? Technical debt?! Oh, I’m bored now… guess I’ll go inject my brilliance somewhere else.
Discipline is part of the recipe for brilliance. So often, I find myself hearing of people’s problems and I realize that the problem is a manifestation of your poor discipline. It’s not necessarily that you did something wrong, misconstrued requirements or misconfigured procedures, no… it’s that you didn’t actually try to read the error message, look at the docs, catalog your technical debt, make a phased rollout plan, decide on what tests you’ll need, write a well bounded scope, … no. These “brilliant” people are fully capable of doing this, they just aren’t disciplined enough
You just stuck your balls to the wall and said “boss, I think it’s cold outside.” How about you go open the fucking door and check?
/s… I got a little carried away there.
I feel that. Theres a strict requirement of fortitude in this industry. Fighting against an unknown bug/challenge is draining and requires admitting you lack knowledge and being willing to persevere in the face of a fruitless result. Shits hard and will beat you down if you let it.
Yeah. I’m currently in a situation where we picked up a new hire and she keeps dropping these problems on me. Whenever she runs into something she doesn’t understand, I get a Teams message:
Hi partofthevvvvvvvooooiiiicccceeeeee
It’s happening again 🤦♀️
The numbers don’t look right in SLT and the numbers matched yesterday, I don’t know…
They were fine yesterday, then they were all wrong all by themselves. Like magic.
Can you call real quick?
By this point, I’m already fucking irritated and I haven’t even responded yet.
- What do you mean by SLT? What the fuck is that, a dashboard?
- What are you comparing the numbers against to know they’re wrong?
- Did you create a minimal reproducible example in SQL, to demonstrate the issue?
- Did you halfsplit the problem by checking the Bronze tier data for the discrepancy?
- Did you open a ticket?
- And no, no I can’t fucking call. Please type the problem you’re actually having so that I can help you without spending three hours on the phone.
… she proceeds to create the ticket. MRE is a bunch of pseudocode referencing nonexistent tables with footnotes like, “this is the kind of tests we should check.” Oh, but you couldn’t be bothered to write the fucking test?
At a certain point, the ticket just falls into chaos:
- Her: The other team is comparing against their own dashboard, that’s how they know there’s a problem.
- Me: Please get the configuration options necessary to reproduce the calculations in their dashboard.
- Her: Here’s a list of the values they’re using to filter users.
- Me: That list counts 36. Your prior screenshot said the filter has 17 selections.
- Her: Jose said that’s the list of team members. The dashboard filters to team members.
- Me: Okay. I asked for the dashboard filters, not the team members.
- Her: Jose says they’re both the team members.
- Me: …
So after explaining (10x) that, to troubleshoot the dashboards discrepancy, we actually need the filter values from the dashboard… we end up on a 3 hour call, because none of this is fucking landing.
So here I am doing other people’s jobs while I’m already busy enough from my own. I get so burnt out sometimes.
I’ll admit I let out a pained chuckle while reading that. We all have at least one like that who, almost like a savant terrorist, can pick the worst time after being ‘just dangerous enough’ to inflict maximum pain for minimum effort. And then youre left with all that energy from exasperation just bouncing around inside.
I’ve long said that the more people you add to a software project, the longer it will take and the worse the final product will be. Your scenario describes one of the many reasons why this is the case.
Interesting because i think i identified the same problem as you but i think of it as delusion. A lot of people (most people?) honestly believe that being smart means figuring things out with little effort. But all the smartest people ive ever met are extremely well organized and hardworking BECAUSE they’re so smart. They’re able to see the big picture and have a very sharp insight that problems are solved with an organized well planned approach, which often involves a lot of tedium.
Smart people aren’t bored by that, they see how the tedium ties directly into success/solutions/rewards. Dumb people really believe that they can be smart by divining solutions and that could not be further from the truth
Hiking groups are full of this crap at the moment. Even for things that a basic spreadsheet would suffice
The worst one I saw was on hacker News yesterday which was a ai avalanche prediction site, which is an absolutely shit idea and will kill someone
This is 2015 all over again where IoT hit mainstream consumers and every project on Kickstarter was a simple thing that doesn’t need Bluetooth with added Bluetooth.
Communits shits on vibe coded projects calling them slopcode Projects shut down
See! They are just garbage liability! Why are they hitting themselves lol?!?!
Easy come, easy go
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.
I have 2 self hosted slop apps I build and maintain myself. I think people would genuinely get great use out of them.
…but then I’m inviting critiques and feature requests and am roped into supporting them so it’s not just a big pile of shit that wastes everyone’s time. And I don’t want to spend my limited free time making common sense improvements to improve it for others. I want to write a lazy Claude prompt with insufficient context, get it barely doing what I need, and then spend the rest of my time eating crayons and similar pastimes.
Just to nit pick (though maybe not) is there a social contract? That usually implies in exchange for X, you get Y.
If the thing is provided as FOSS, what does the dev get, contract wise?
Isn’t that how we end up with devs walking away entirely due to “I downloaded your project, you owe me xyz, you fuck”? I’ve seen that happen more than once and it’s a real factor in projects being abandoned, even before slopcode.
Speaking for myself only: when I share something, it’s usually something I made for myself that I think others might enjoy or find useful.
As the dev, I’m happy to look at suggestions or reports, with no guarantee that your idea will be implemented. If it is, I credit it and you.
I also refuse PRs, because if I am developing for me and sharing, then I’m not developing a product for sale to spec or running a democracy. I don’t know you, you don’t know me and you likely don’t know what the long term road map or invariant constraints are, so I’d rather just not. I realise that’s not a commonly held position but it’s in the same “limited time” category.
I’m happy for you to fork it, ask questions and spin up your own tho - that’s why I like AGPL-3.
Between all that, I’ve been able to avoid the excesses of both sides but YMMV.
People can code publicly for themselves for sure but there is clearly a subset of people who feel like their slop is worthy of community attention and resources in the same way as traditional projects that have been proven over time. It’s the same as the Ai art slop paddlers thinking their work is as valuable when they don’t even know what’s it in. To be frank, largely parasitic people using largely parasitic tools. A lot of that community doesn’t hold those values you eloquently stated.
I agree with that…but I wonder if we only ever hear from the so called parasitic ones?
Suppose a kid in Africa uses Claude to code an app that tracks the spread of a disease in their community and predict the next outbreak site based on x,y,z.
That’s technically slop code too. Do they get a pass because the cause is virtuous or not crowed about? By the letter of the law…no. But by the spirit of the law, probably yes.
I guess the difference is, how much leeway do we have for genuine enthusiasm vs parasitism. It’s hard to tell sometimes on social media where too many people are doing preening displays in public - and we’ve probably all been guilty of that.
As a rule, if a thing interests me, I’ll read the post, hit the repo, and dig around the files. If I see obvious use of llm in the code (like the stupidly verbose comments that LLMs like to pepper throughout), that usually means that the person either didn’t look, didn’t know to look or doesn’t care. That’s bad.
Bad intro post + bad readme.md + weird commit history + weird AI comments = I’m out.
Honestly, I’m usually out after the first one or two these days.
Yeah that’s a good point, I guess our current social app structure isn’t designed at all to filter signal and noise. The art world has galleries which kind of do that at the expense of barrier to entry. Maybe things like Flathub and repos end up seen that way.
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:
- A post is sharing/advertising a project. The poster is two hours old.
- 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 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 is now the expected norm 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.
