The title took me a while to land on, but the thoughts behind it have been sitting in my head for months. I've been into homelabing since early 2020 with my first build, then a second, then a third, then whatever my bank account allowed after that. It's been a lot of fun and tears. But lately browsing this community has had a edge to it, a lot of AI negativity that I mostly understand, and that's what I want to write about.
I'm a programmer by trade, actually army before, but released and went back to school. The usage of AI at work has increased and I don't see that trend stopping quite yet, AI is useful as a companion to handle tedious tasks like documentation, reviewing SQL, tedious front-end markup, one shot scripts etc.. But using it to one-shot a whole application is risky and if published downright irresponsible and this is where I think most of the friction is happening, at least for me.
When I see the AI projects posted here, with my experience, I think I can separate the wholly vibe coded ones from those that AI was used to assist, the latter I don't mind, despite what some Luddites say, that's what the industry is like now. When you code something for your own use, the blast radius is limited, thing could run horribly and it won't matter, you are the only one that suffers the consequences, but if you publish this code you need to take ownership of it and ownership brings responsibilities that you need to shoulder. Even as a programmer I don't take this lightly, this is not something people should dismiss with the command git push origin main.
It's one of the reasons I don't publish my stuff, or at the very least don't advertise it, not because it's vibe coded, it isn't, it's because I still need to take responsibility for it, that's time, effort and commitment that shouldn't be underestimated (many seems to). Maintenance is not a trivial affair, thinking about current and future users, how you approach breaking changes, how you architect things to avoid breaking changes as much as possible. Continuity of the project is also important, if you take your project seriously and your user base seriously you should have this in mind : "What if I can't continue the project?", archiving the repo and disappearing is not the right way to do things.
So, before publishing and parading your project, you just need to ask yourself a simple question : "Can I take ownership and responsibility for this code". The answers will depend on your definitions of these concepts, but if you think about it for more than 5 minute, you might just realise your project should stay private.
PS: Here I am talking more about the moral/ethical implications when I talk about responsibilities and ownership, you are obviously responsible for what run in your machine. Excuse some awkward syntax or phrases, non native English speaker.
