A couple weeks ago, I saw a cool video on YouTube. Hugh Howey, the guy who wrote the Silo books (and is executive producer on the Apple TV adaptation) had made a writing application for writers, and everything about it looked awesome, especially the price tag. Not only was it free, but it was open source as well. I installed it, and I shared it to a writing comm.
I expected to get at least one thanks for spreading the good word, but instead people told me I was posting AI slop. I had no idea! It IS open source, but I didn't think to look on GitHub. So, sure enough, I took a look, and the authors were hughhowey, and Claude, Anthropoic's AI chat bot.
I asked Howey for a comment on it on the YouTube video, and he actually gave me a pretty good answer. He said he made the tool he wanted to use to write books, and he figured he'd share it. Also, he said he had been looking for the perfect tool, what he wanted, and he felt it didn't exist. He also implied he was trying to pay people to write his program, but no one would (at least, at what he was offering). I thought, that's fair. He made it for his personal use, and he released it for free, and posted the code so that anyone can see it.
I decided against using the program because I don't want anyone to be able to say that AI helped me write. Although I will say, to the app's credit, as a Mac user here, anything I write in (current choice is Ellipsus, a privacy and anti-AI focused web-based writing tool; freemium; but also iWork Pages, LibreOffice Writer, TextExit (Mac's version of Notepad), whatever — Apple "Intelligence" is going to suggest stuff as I write. Happens in Firefox, too; and Safari. Howey's tool is able to mute that. It also disables the system spell check. Basically he makes it so you can just write, without your OS looking over your shoulder. (There's a toggle to turn this on and off, for editing.) His reasoning is that if you have a character or town that isn't in the dictionary, you shouldn't be pestered by red squiggly lines.
This isn't the first time I've been fooled by vibe-coded AI slop. About a year ago, or so, I downloaded a cool iPhone app where I could enter in something that happened frequently (or infrequently), and log every time it happens. Some call these habit trackers, but I don't use them to motivate me to keep the habit; I use them to look back. Like when I finished a book, or a movie, or a game. Or when I went to a restaurant, or visited another city or something like that. Also some health/home stuff. So I can show my wife the receipts, as it were.
The app was lacking a few features I wanted (like Dark Mode!), so I wrote the author... after paying $5 for his app. He wrote back and said he didn't know anything about coding, he was out of AI tokens, and he wasn't going to pay more until more people bought his app. Like any reasonable person, he was trying to come out ahead, and apparently he wasn't there (or ahead "enough"). Again I made the decision to drop the app, and I found another one that does the same stuff but better.
The first case, it's kind of on me because it's not that hard to look at a GitHub and see Claude as a contributor. With iOS apps, AFAIK you can't do that. With Android apps, I'm pretty sure you can open an APK in a zip program and look at the Java code. (I'm not a programmer but I know a thing or two.) But back when I was big into modding Android phones, I heard they were going to start encrypting APKs so people couldn't just steal the code or whatever. I do not know if that ever came to pass. I never learned anything from unpacking an APK anyway.
Is there another way to tell?
Maybe there should be a repository for AI-generated/vibe-coded apps, but it would be like playing whack-a-mole and it would be hard to keep up or maintain it. I suppose it would be possible to ask an AI chatbot if it can detect AI involvement, but that kind of defeats the purpose.
Random markdown files and comment blocks all over the place.
I've been in the professional software space for 35 years and one of the hard rules is documentation and code must be kept separate. Each has it's own place, goals and infrastructure. Often people have access to documentation, even technical in depth documentation, that should not have access to the code. Documentation is often translated in larger multi-national teams and used for all sorts of non-code related tasks throughout the organisation. AI is trained on a lot of tutorials where it's normal to have huge blocks of documentation in the code and kept as markdown files in a project. It's mostly meant to be descriptive to others and as an example, a convenient way of keeping everything together for people to learn from.
Now with AI slop coding you see this pattern being applied to all coding with huge amounts of comments, entire blocks of documentation and markdown files in the code. Where this, at least in my experience, wasn't the case in professional environments in the past. Sure a comment here and there to set people on the right path, but the inclination to write comments is often treated as code smell.
See I tend to over comment as a hobbiest that writes their own code, so that kinda bums me out.
I think you’re underestimating the amount of comments we’re talking about. I routinely see AI generate files where more than half the lines are comments! And the content of those comments are often inanely detailed and focused on inconsequential stuff, often referring to earlier iterations (“we’re no longer doing X because Y“) when those iterations were never even commited.
Same here. Even at my job we all comment our code because we spend more time in it and need a quick way to search the code for parts doing specific tasks. I did the same for a class and got a 0 for using AI. Makes me sad too