I understand the scepticism, it’s easy to be wary of assisted coding as a gut reaction these days. However, the programmer replied to his own merge request:

I put roughly 200 hours into this (largely due to not being familiar with the codebase and technologies involved beforehand)

…and I find it hard to believe a vibe coder would bother prompting his magic eightball for that long? Maybe that’s my personal prejudice against that particular set of (often wannabe) programmers showing.

There’s also an “AI” disclosure in the original merge request that says:

• None of the submitted code is AI generated. I wrote all of it myself (largely by copying existing code).

• I used OpenAI Codex in the following ways:

  • I used it to generate a quick prototype to give me an idea of where to start. The prototype was MUCH more limited and I rewrote it from scratch (i.e. none of the code submitted here is from there).
  • I used it to help me with debugging/understanding some of the stuff new to me (e.g. how does a value get to QML, wayland protocols, understanding crashes, …).
  • I used it to review the code before submitting it (in addition to manually reviewing it myself). It caught a few minor issues.
  • I used it to write a “touchpad simulator” patch that I used for testing touchpad gestures (not submitted).

YMMV on what side of vibe coding that usage falls.