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On the flip side, if you’re vibe coding an app you should seriously consider whether it’s something you want to open source or make available publicly. There’s a social contract that comes with that.
I have 2 self hosted slop apps I build and maintain myself. I think people would genuinely get great use out of them.
…but then I’m inviting critiques and feature requests and am roped into supporting them so it’s not just a big pile of shit that wastes everyone’s time. And I don’t want to spend my limited free time making common sense improvements to improve it for others. I want to write a lazy Claude prompt with insufficient context, get it barely doing what I need, and then spend the rest of my time eating crayons and similar pastimes.
This is the attitude of an existing programmer who is using these tools. What I’ve found on here is a specific pattern that keeps repeating:
a social contract that comes with thatand think there’s something strange or accusatory/interrogatory when people ask questions they think are too difficult or technicalThere’s a clear disconnect. You’re talking about the homelab community which is a bit different but I specifically remember someone making an accessible Android UI and being extremely frustrated at people asking for the entire code to be released, and at people saying there’s not enough features there for that poster to be looping in advertisements on a fucking home page UI.
I get the impression that primarily-slop coders on some level think they’re doing programming, because of how you can get functional prototypes of code that is way above what a total beginner can write on their own. They think having code that compiles (whatever it’s usually Python there’s no compiling) means the hard part is over. They don’t seem to understand that the questions and concerns about vibe coding aren’t moral complaints but genuine concerns about liability, running code even the author doesn’t understand, and a complete cluelessness about what they should be doing to evaluate the code besides prompting it to be “good with no mistakes”.
That Android UI project seemed like a little thing a few people could install on their grandparents’ phones. It’s normal for the author not to understand every little thing. But being totally clueless and being offended at the suggestion, being entitled to put ads in it to get 0.0016 USD per year per grandma in exchange for taking up a quarter of her screen forever, not understanding why this looks scummy, why refusing to release 60% of the code looks scummy, why half the questions are being asked at all.
Again this would not be a problem if this wasn’t now expected for a significant portion of any projects you find online. A lot of projects are the first genuine effort of someone out there and they’re not perfect but they didn’t feel like the unceremonious implosion of the entire philosophical concept of personal computing.
And I’m fucking shit at writing good code and I’m pissed.
Just to nit pick (though maybe not) is there a social contract? That usually implies in exchange for X, you get Y.
If the thing is provided as FOSS, what does the dev get, contract wise?
Isn't that how we end up with devs walking away entirely due to "I downloaded your project, you owe me xyz, you fuck"? I've seen that happen more than once and it's a real factor in projects being abandoned, even before slopcode.
Speaking for myself only: when I share something, it's usually something I made for myself that I think others might enjoy or find useful.
As the dev, I'm happy to look at suggestions or reports, with no guarantee that your idea will be implemented. If it is, I credit it and you.
I also refuse PRs, because if I am developing for me and sharing, then I'm not developing a product for sale to spec or running a democracy. I don't know you, you don't know me and you likely don't know what the long term road map or invariant constraints are, so I'd rather just not. I realise that's not a commonly held position but it's in the same "limited time" category.
I'm happy for you to fork it, ask questions and spin up your own tho - that's why I like AGPL-3.
Between all that, I've been able to avoid the excesses of both sides but YMMV.
People can code publicly for themselves for sure but there is clearly a subset of people who feel like their slop is worthy of community attention and resources in the same way as traditional projects that have been proven over time. It’s the same as the Ai art slop paddlers thinking their work is as valuable when they don’t even know what’s it in. To be frank, largely parasitic people using largely parasitic tools. A lot of that community doesn’t hold those values you eloquently stated.
I agree with that...but I wonder if we only ever hear from the so called parasitic ones?
Suppose a kid in Africa uses Claude to code an app that tracks the spread of a disease in their community and predict the next outbreak site based on x,y,z.
That's technically slop code too. Do they get a pass because the cause is virtuous or not crowed about? By the letter of the law...no. But by the spirit of the law, probably yes.
I guess the difference is, how much leeway do we have for genuine enthusiasm vs parasitism. It's hard to tell sometimes on social media where too many people are doing preening displays in public - and we've probably all been guilty of that.
As a rule, if a thing interests me, I'll read the post, hit the repo, and dig around the files. If I see obvious use of llm in the code (like the stupidly verbose comments that LLMs like to pepper throughout), that usually means that the person either didn't look, didn't know to look or doesn't care. That's bad.
Bad intro post + bad readme.md + weird commit history + weird AI comments = I'm out.
Honestly, I'm usually out after the first one or two these days.
Yeah that’s a good point, I guess our current social app structure isn’t designed at all to filter signal and noise. The art world has galleries which kind of do that at the expense of barrier to entry. Maybe things like Flathub and repos end up seen that way.