According to the release:
Adds experimental PostgreSQL support
The code was written by Cursor and Claude
14,997 added lines of code, and 10,202 lines removed
reviewed and heavily tested over 2-3 weeks
This makes me uneasy, especially as ntfy is an internet facing service. I am now looking for alternatives.
Am I overreacting or do you all share the same concern?
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Damn, I guess I’ll stick to the older release for now. Hopefully a viable alternative/fork comes around.
Uovote and comment on: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/issues/1645
Please add this to the post.
Oh goddamn it, I’m using this and don’t have an alternative lined up
What is your concern? If it’s a generic “AI”, then I can assure you tha pretty much every software has AI code in it already. Heck, Linus is accepting PRs where AI has been used.
AI is useful. It produces useful code.
Like creative writing, it won’t produce something novel. But man, 75% of code is just boiler plate. AI can do a lot.
That does not absolve anyone of committing crap code. Put your name to it. Own it. Take the consequence of delivering shit code or great code, no matter how it was written. Don’t let AI be a crutch. But you’d be god damn fooling not to use it, where it’s right.
There’s a big difference between “AI was used in some capacity” and “Entirely vibe coded”
Of course. And when I hear “vibe coded”, I hear someone starting with “make me a cool app” and going from there, with zero understanding of the technical architecture.
If you have a thorough, deeply thought through technical spec, then AI can write a great amount of tests up against that spec, say, and you’ve got a fantastic base for TDD.
I honestly feel like a lot of the downvotes are people thinking AI means “clueless programmer having an AI do its work for you”. Many highly productive, deeply technical developers use it every day.
Idk man by the sounds of it, the AI implemented the entire back end change, adding 14k lines of generated code. The dev doesn’t even seem confident with his own testing. Sounds like it’s closer to the vibe-coded end of the scale to me.
I’ve been meaning to give Ntfy a shot but now I likely won’t. If I wanted a vibe coded project I’d just do it myself.
Massive changes made by robit in what has been a pretty stable utility for years is (obviously?) my main concern. It’s absolutely a crutch, and seeing a dev lean on it like this gives me the same feeling Coach must’ve got seeing his star player limping into the big game on a real one. If dude wants to check out and let the machine run his project fine, but I’ll be looking for something someone still cares about and works on.
I think you’d be a fool to use it. At this point it’s subsidized by their need for training data/desire to manufacture dependency, but that won’t be the case for long. It’s expensive, detrimental to your skills, and damaging to both our planet and society. It centralizes and gatekeeps access to information, the most powerful resource of all. “Treat it like an inexperienced dev” managers say, while it replaces their opportunities to gain experience. How are they supposed to even tell great code from shit when everything they’re exposed to has been run through the averaging machine?
I saved your comment for the added arguments against AI.
If using ntfy for UnifiedPush: https://unifiedpush.org/users/distributors/
What’s the difference between ntfy (android app) and ntfy.sh?
Ntfy.sh is the hosted version. Hosted by the author. Ntfy (android, ios) is the app that you use as a client.
I’ve never used ntfy.sh
I’ve only used Ntfy app for Universal Push that some apps need, and they recommend ntfy. Does this affect the app then? Ah, if so, what alternative can I use for just that purpose?
Gotify is probably the next best thing, at least in terms of self hosted. Though doesn’t have the wide support of ntfy.
Look, if he wanted to introduce AI code, whatever, but doing it all at once in a 14k line change is crazy.
Surely it would be better to introduce AI by letting it handle misc changes here and there instead of starting with the “biggest release ever done” (his words), no?
Fuck, I love ntfy, it’s one of the best self hosted push notification systems I’ve used. It has been flawless so far.
Don’t like this.
I’m a developer
I sometimes sometimes use AI for an answer to a complicated problem because normally I’d open up 20 pages , have to go through them all to find the right answer
AI gets me the answer right away, though it likely is completely wrong or at least partially wrong. Either way, it gives me a general direction and with that I only have to search through one or two pages to confirm, so the same process is just a little faster.
I laso have used AI on a couple of occasions to ask it to write code for a complicated problem. Again, you don’t copy the code, god no, it’s always the worst, and it is in 80% of the cases still at least riddled with bugs, or just complete bullshit. However, it might give me an alternative idea or a direction to take to implement or fix this complicated feature problem.
That’s the extent to which I’ve used AI and for the foreseeable future that won’t change because AI still can’t code. It’s still wildly flailing around and it might produce something that implements a certain functionality, but it’s a guarantee that that functionality will have more bugs and security holes than features
I understand this comment. AI sometimes saves a ton of mental power and time when I’m stuck on an issue. It can give some really good suggestions. Also, AI is a godsend for frontend shit. I don’t care what y’all say, I’m never touching CSS and HTML ever again. lmao.
Nah, wouldn’t do that. CSS needs to be well designed to function properly, you need actual developers for that or you’ll screw over your users.
But yeah, to give quick pointers and ideas to flesh out, it’s reasonably useful
If that is enough to warrant it’s extreme energy use, the spread of AI slop everywhere, the pollution, the uncontrolled datacenter expansions, the explosion in hardware costs it created, the countless death and suffering it caused through AI psychosis, the AI childporn bots (hello grok, are you still the world’s biggest child porn producer or did Elmo finally reign you in to again be mecha Hitler?), the…
Long story short, AI will likely end this world in a long list of fucked up ways, I don’t think it’s worth it
Until then, I’ll use it as a suggestion tool, not much more
Bro, what the hell. Lmao. “Hey AI is horrible in all ways and is doing harm to the planet and people and kids, but I’ll use it regardless. Hear me I’m a good guy. I hate AI, but I’ll use it”. That’s virtu signaling, isn’t it?
It’s not virtue signalling, I know very well what I’m doing is hypocritical at best, but it’s also unavoidable for me. For one, I’m using it like this at work where they’d love nothing better than for me to start vibe coding. This is the compromise I’ve been able to make so far.
No judgement. I just thought it was funny.
I am also a developer and agree entirely.
Asking for advice, examples or the occasional boilerplate is at most how I use AI and certainly not integrated directly into my IDE.
Well, Telegram does the something for free.
Telegram does the thing for your sweet juicy data
we’re all so fucked
apt-mark hold ntfy
It looks like that tool is more or less built by a single developer (you already trust their judgment anyways!), and even though the code came through in a single PR it was a merge from a branch that had 79 separate commits: https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy/pull/1619
Also glancing through it a bit, huge portions of that are straightforward refactors or even just formatting changes caused by adding a new backend option.
I’m not going to say it’s fine, but they didn’t just throw Claude at a problem and let it rewrite 25k lines of code unnecessarily.
Yeah, I mean, with or without AI, I’ve always only had a big pull request for releases, from a stable release branch into the main branch, the release branch would be a merge of various branches or just be worked on directly on various stages.
One big pull request doesn’t really mean anything.
Something like https://graphite.com/ to create stacked PRs that are reviewable probably would have helped. Can be replicated with local LLMs or remote AI providers with locally configured agentic workflows. Never used graphite personally, but I’ve seen some open source maintainers use it to split up large PRs.
Wow a differentiated opinion on AI use :)
Any AI usage immediately discredits the software for me, because it calls into question all of their past and future work.
Oh boy, do I have bad news about 90% of the internet for you…
Linus sent an email recently to the Kernel Mailing List trashing AI slop and rejecting AI generated patches. The fact that he used it to play around with a script doesn’t invalidate the fact that he distrusts code written by LLMs when it actually matters.
you mean this statement? https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/08/linus_versus_llms_ai_slop_docs/?td=rt-3a
If yes, your statement does not really match what Linus said.
I switched to Gotify when I ran into an issue where ntfy would delete old api tokens when creating more than 20. Only thing missing in Gotify is UniversalPush, other than that it feels actually more solid than ntfy to me.
I’d run for the hills
There are so many issues with AI
Like ppl thinking skilled engineers cannot vet AI output. AI is pretty good for programming.
It’s not. That’s the problem. It actually sucks ass. It’s super low quality for anything more complex they s very simple CRUD app or a simple function. I say this as someone who s a heavy LLM user. It’s just bad code. It makes all kinds of simple mistakes. Just because code compiles doesn’t mean it’s good or does what you need it to do
I think it largely depends on what you’re building. You’re not gonna get build a company overnight with a few prompts but it’s much more powerful than you’ve described.
It’s really not though. If you think it is I really suggest to re-think your perspective on what maintainable shippable code looks like. It’s basically automating copying from stack overflow. There’s so many little considerations that come into development.
Still sounds like something someone would say who has had a bad time and experience with generating code lol. It really isn’t that hard to be an engineer and to get what you want out of code generation.
You’re absolutely right, and the vast majority of people on this platform seem to get offended by anything AI related. Software engineers have been reviewing code made by other people since the dawn of the craft. Guess what y’all, AI generated code looks exactly the same, if not better on the first pass at creating a thing.
Down vote me all you want homies. You’re living in a fantasy if you think all AI is slop. Sure, I can see how it’s ruining some content on the Internet, but for code related tasks, its going to dramatically change the world for the better.
Ppl are fucked lol, I’m over here writing a lot of stuff with AI, maybe it’s not always perfect but nothing ever is, and without iteration or dedication to the craft you’re just gonna sit there be all upset and judgy because you’ve never seen it lol
And yet there are cases like the Huntarr debacle, where the dev simply thought “and make sure your code complies with best security practices” to their vibe code prompts actually made it secure.
They added 14k lines of code in a week, and ripped out 10k lines of existing code. That’s not something that a skilled programmer can reasonably vet in that amount of time. This is showing all the signs of AI slop, and none of the signs of debugged or vetted code.
That’s a bit extreme
I have a few decades programming experience, as a professional software engineer, an open source developer, and a DevOps engineer. There is no way in hell I would do a code review where 15k lines were added and a similar amount of lines removed without having a long discussion with the person who made those changes. I’d want to ask a lot of detailed questions about the changes, questions that an LLM isn’t likely to answer, and most definitely not questions I’d be inclined to try to type into an LLM to try to get an answer.
Over the years I’ve dealt with all manner of bugs, from overflows & underflows, to bad assumptions about logic flow, and much much more. The whole purpose of pointed questioning of the author is to be comfortable with decisions made in the code and to minimize the chances of all sorts of potential bugs.
I think it largely depends on what you’re building. You’re not gonna get what you’ve got over there over night with a few giant prompts.
This doesn’t make me uneasy. It makes me resentful, a little angry, and a lot tired. Thanks for bringing it to attention, I will make sure that nothing of that project or from that author will ever cross my ecosystem again.
You’re gonna have a lot of hate in your blood if you go around acting like the most skilled engineers aren’t using AI to write code.
Most skilled engineers, and even mildly skilled engineers don’t use slopgenerators to write code. Some of them use it sometimes to do some menial tasks, although I’m not convinced it actually saves them time. It sure doesn’t every time we measure it.
There is however a plague of low skilled people who convinced themselves that they’ve found a shortcut to being an engineer. Those people are producing bad things at a fast pace, and the only reason we’re not in an unsolvable crisis yet is that their slop isn’t hitting prod very often on account of being bad.Lol you can definitely generate a large amount of non slop and if you keep believing that then you’ll never see it as a tool to multiply your skills on.
There’s a massive difference between “using AI to write code” and refactoring almost 15k lines in a single push.
The “best” uses of AI in coding are for small blocks. You don’t just tell it “I need a program that does X, Y, and Z” because that will (at best) result in horrible code. Instead, it’s best practice to use it for small blocks of code, where you tell it something more akin to “I need a function that takes {a} as a variable, does {thing}, and outputs {x}.” That way you’re not using it to generate giant swaths of code all at once, you’re just using it to generate individual functions that you can then use as needed.
But it also means that the “most skilled” (as you put it) programmers are basically putting themselves in a permanent debugging seat instead of working as a developer. And in many cases, debugging code can be just as (or more) difficult than writing the initial code. It’s also why senior devs exist to audit code from junior devs, because it’s assumed that junior devs will inevitably make mistakes that need debugging, or will make code that clashes with code from other junior devs. And it’s the senior dev’s job to ensure that the code is both functional and integrated properly.
And this “adding 15k lines of code and ripping out 10k lines” push smells a lot like the former “write me a program to do {thing}” usage.
But 15k likes of code and heavily reviewed over 2-3 weeks is not just adding code and ripping it out. It’s extremely easy to get 15k lines of code changes in a couple hours with AI. And it’s not gonna be all slop.
Definitely time to find an alternative. What the actual fuck is this
