Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some…
A week or two back there was a post on Reddit where someone was advertising a project they’d put up on GitHub, and when I went to look at it I didn’t find any documentation explaining how it actually worked - just how to install it and run it.
So I gave Gemini the URL of the repository and asked it to generate a “Deep Research” report on how it worked. Got a very extensive and detailed breakdown, including some positives and negatives that weren’t mentioned in the existing readme.
I used to use emojis in my documentation very lightly because I thought they were a good way to provide visual cues. But now with all the people vibe coding their own readme docs with freaking emojis everywhere I have to stop using them.
ttbomk, emojis are legal function-names in both Swift & Julia…
The Swift example was damned incomprehensible, & … well, it was Apple stuff, so making it look idiotic might have been some kind of cultural-exclusivity intention…
The Julia stuff, though, means that you can use Greek symbols, etc, for functions, & get things looking more like what they should…
Also, I think emojis are actually better than my all-text style, for communicating intonation/emotion ( I’m old: learned last century ), & maybe us old geezers ought to adapt a bit, to such things…
That does NOT mean that cartoon “code” is good-enough, whether it’s cartoonish in plaintext or in emojis, though…
I’m just trying to keep the cultural-prejudice & the code-quality being distinct-categories of judgement, you know?
( & cultural-prejudice is an actual thing, though it’s usually called “religious wars”, isn’t it, in geekdom? )
Man… of all the vibe coding tools, Lovable has gotta be one of the most useless, too.
I work with people (all middle managers) who love Loveable because they can type a two sentence description of an app and it will immediately vomit something into existence. But the code it generates is an absolute disaster and the UIs it designs (which is supposed to be its main draw) is some of the most generic crap I’ve ever seen.
Got a job application this with a one line cover letter “Iam interested to work with u are company” it was kinda refreshing to see that instead of a whole page of slop, like most of them are these days.
I think for someone that is very knowledgeable In a project they would probably somehow now if there is vibe coding. I think this will affect brand new projects but not that much of the older codebase. Even think it might enable finding old bugs in old open source codebase.
You are more optimistic than the maintainers of those older projects that have started to ban LLM generated bug reports. They tend to be a waste of time for the maintainers (e.g.: cURL project).
LLMs definitely kills the trust in open source software, because now everything can be a vibe-coded mess and it’s sometimes hard to check.
I don’t trust proprietary software anyway.
Might make open source more trustworthy, It can’t be any harder to check than closed source.
A week or two back there was a post on Reddit where someone was advertising a project they’d put up on GitHub, and when I went to look at it I didn’t find any documentation explaining how it actually worked - just how to install it and run it.
So I gave Gemini the URL of the repository and asked it to generate a “Deep Research” report on how it worked. Got a very extensive and detailed breakdown, including some positives and negatives that weren’t mentioned in the existing readme.
Yeah, LLMs do a decent job explaining what code does.
I don’t know yet how good Gemini about it,but I think https://deepwiki.com/ this tool will overkill anything for now
yeah it’s to the point now where if I see emojis in the readme.md on the repo I just don’t even bother.
I used to use emojis in my documentation very lightly because I thought they were a good way to provide visual cues. But now with all the people vibe coding their own readme docs with freaking emojis everywhere I have to stop using them.
Mildly annoying.
✨ especially this one ✨
Is the ✨sparkly emoji✨ the <BLINK> of the 21st century? Discuss.
Bring back
<MARQUEE>, dang it.ttbomk, emojis are legal function-names in both Swift & Julia…
The Swift example was damned incomprehensible, & … well, it was Apple stuff, so making it look idiotic might have been some kind of cultural-exclusivity intention…
The Julia stuff, though, means that you can use Greek symbols, etc, for functions, & get things looking more like what they should…
Also, I think emojis are actually better than my all-text style, for communicating intonation/emotion ( I’m old: learned last century ), & maybe us old geezers ought to adapt a bit, to such things…
That does NOT mean that cartoon “code” is good-enough, whether it’s cartoonish in plaintext or in emojis, though…
I’m just trying to keep the cultural-prejudice & the code-quality being distinct-categories of judgement, you know?
( & cultural-prejudice is an actual thing, though it’s usually called “religious wars”, isn’t it, in geekdom? )
_ /\ _
Check out this one I came across earlier - https://github.com/Jtensetti/fediverse-career-nexus/blob/main/README.md
It’s a federated LinkedIn. ofc it’s vibe coded.
Man… of all the vibe coding tools, Lovable has gotta be one of the most useless, too.
I work with people (all middle managers) who love Loveable because they can type a two sentence description of an app and it will immediately vomit something into existence. But the code it generates is an absolute disaster and the UIs it designs (which is supposed to be its main draw) is some of the most generic crap I’ve ever seen.
0/10, do not recommend.
Who actually tried this?
A handful of people - https://mastodon.social/tags/noltosocial
or anywhere. Job descriptions for example.
Got a job application this with a one line cover letter “Iam interested to work with u are company” it was kinda refreshing to see that instead of a whole page of slop, like most of them are these days.
I think for someone that is very knowledgeable In a project they would probably somehow now if there is vibe coding. I think this will affect brand new projects but not that much of the older codebase. Even think it might enable finding old bugs in old open source codebase.
You are more optimistic than the maintainers of those older projects that have started to ban LLM generated bug reports. They tend to be a waste of time for the maintainers (e.g.: cURL project).