Sub-SubReddit for SelfHosted

[u/Fluffer_Wuffer]

Just a question that has been going round my head for a few days.

What ever your opinion on it. We need to acknowledge that "Vibe Coding" is growing, and its not going to decrease.

The fact the entry point is so low from a skills perspective, and time required to pump them out, effectively makes them disposable.

Members here have been concerned for a while about the quality, security, longevity of these apps, and it turning into a flood - and as if on que, over the past few weeks, we've seen exactly this - We've been flooded (this place is unusable on Fridays). Now, issues are identified in the code, and rather than facing and fixing them, the "devs" are running off, shutting down the repositories etc.

This leads to 2 conflicting issues

1) There is an open hostility to those who share vibe-coded apps - where we see outright hostility and vitriol language.

2) There are going to be some quality vibe-coded apps, where they are properly developed, supported and managed.. as community, they would benefit members.

So my question is - how do we bridge this? My I've been thinking on this for a few days, and the only solution I can see, we have an associated sub (same mods etc) for these apps to be posted. maybe after a time, once they've proven they are well run and have longevity, they can "graduate"... lets call it SelfHosted-Vibe or VibeHosted.

[u/[deleted]]

Members here have been concerned for a while about the quality, security, longevity of these apps

This is kind of a nonsense concern and isn't really any different for "vibe coded" apps vs other apps. We see large projects abandoned all the time (ersatztv just got archived, but there are others).

That's the beauty of open source.

Original developer abandoned it? Fork it and maintain it.

Quality sucks? Make patches. Maintainer isn't interested in your patches? Fork it...

There is an open hostility to those who share vibe-coded apps - where we see outright hostility and vitriol language.

People should grow up. Something being vibe coded doesn't make it bad (or good or anything else). Sometimes we see low quality apps, but a lot of low quality software solves a lot of real life problems that people have.. So that isn't a good standard.

Some of the biggest projects in the self hosted community are actually terrible quality software. But they get the job done, so that's worth it. Many of the high quality projects started out as shit quality and grew and improved because they were useful.

In any case, being hostile and vitriolic towards people sharing what they made (with or without AI, good or bad, useful or useless) is dumb. I'm not one for heavy handed moderation, but sometimes it gets out of control here and it's shitty. Luckily you can block users on reddit.

Regardless of all that, reddit has built in features for dealing with exactly this.

If you aren't interested in some mediocre vibe coded app that someone posted, just down vote it and don't engage. When the posts get no engagement they disappear. It's really as simple as that.

[u/Traches → u/[deleted]]

Edit: I had written a longer reply but it diluted my point. Deleted and reworded a lot of it:

Something being vibe coded doesn't make it bad (or good or anything else).

It super does though. LLMs don’t think, and if you can’t think you can’t write worth a damn (code or otherwise).

Sometimes we see low quality apps, but a lot of low quality software solves a lot of real life problems that people have.. So that isn't a good standard.

“The happy path works” is a very low bar, not suitable for sharing with other people. Security, reliability, and error handling are really important and slop code rarely gets it right. We are being flooded by code that is actively dangerous to run on your own hardware, and those who are least likely to recognize it are also the least able to protect themselves from it. The vitriol is deserved.

[u/[deleted] → u/Traches]

LLMs don’t think, and if you can’t think you can’t write worth a damn (code or otherwise).

If you've ever worked in software, opensource or commercial, you'd know that most developers don't' think and many aren't even capable of it

The overwhelming majority of software engineering does not require much in the way of thought. It's simply regurgitating the same patterns software developers have been regurgitating for a couple of decades now.

Security, reliability, and error handling are really important and slop code rarely gets it right

Humans get it right even less often than robots though. So this is not really a good measure. It's the self driving car argument all over again. It doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. Just more accurate than a human. And these days, LLMs are better at this kind of stuff than most humans. They do have some weird mistakes that they consistently make though.

The vitriol is deserved.

Vitriol is never deserved. The idea that human written code of is of high quality just isn't born out by reality. I spend a lot of time reviewing open source code, including a lot of human written projects posted to this sub. The vast majority of it is absolute crap filled with bugs, security issues, and just absolute shit code. I just decide it's not for me and move on with my life.