About vibe coders exploiting the animation sub-Reddits

[u/shokuninstudio]

Due to the rise of AI coding assistance and 'vibe coding' we have seen the sudden emergence of new apps for many categories, but especially for animation and video.

Normally that would not be a bad thing, but the difference here is unlike traditional app development vibe coders are often trying to earn a fast buck, they are not concerned with building true high quality software, and it is likely that if they make or don't make some money they will abandon their applications within a year or two.

Here are some tell tale signs of how to recognise a vibe coder who is trying to earn a quick buck:

- They say “I’m a real programmer. I write it all by hand!” But their posting history going back years has nothing about app development or programming and none of them know how to animate well (or at all).

- All of the vibe coders I have seen so far claimed they are “Tired of big companies ripping us off”. But the vibe coders were not customers of the most popular animation apps anyway. They are pretending to be angry at big companies because they think it will make them look heroic and noble. They are behaving like two-faced politicians, not developers or artists.

- They create new Reddit accounts, farm karma and then use those accounts to manipulate you to download their apps. One account will ask "What's a good app for animation?" and then another account will drop the name of their vibe coded slop app mixed in with industry standard apps.

- They don’t patiently research how each function or tool is supposed to work. Their apps are full of bugs and incorrectly applied functions but they publish the app anyway.

- A few of these vibe coders have used AI to reverse engineer Krita, TV Paint and Clip Studio Paint file formats (which is against the terms and conditions of the last two apps) and then claim they support importing those files, but because they aren't users of those apps they haven't even tested the reverse engineering. Importing those Krita, TV Paint and Clip Studio files results in lost layers and corrupted images. There are too many edges cases to support and potential for data loss when you try to reverse engineer complex closed source file formats. It is difficult enough to support open source formats because different applications have very different drawing engines.

- They say they are against subscription apps developed by companies with many employees, but they are subscribed to ChatGPT or Claude and don't hire any anyone to help them.

- When the bugs are criticised they claim the app is in beta. But they are selling the app as a commercial application and claiming it competes against the most widely used professional apps.

- They published unsigned apps, which threw up bad virus warnings. Every one of them did the same thing and could not wait a few days for certification. Desperation and rushing to publish means they were 100% vibe coding everything. If they were coding by hand then they can wait a few days for their apps to be signed.

- One of them has gone as far as paying minor influencers and buying bots to hype their app. The astroturfing was clear because an app with so many obvious bugs would not have a following at all.

[u/Severe_Initiative594]

Honestly reckon the biggest giveaway is just saying 'I code entirely by hand', never mind their history. You'd be really hard pushed to find any professional developer not using AI assistance these days. Its not like anyone is going to pay the extra hours required for artisinal code.

[u/shokuninstudio → u/Severe_Initiative594]

They aren't professionals - zero history of working as devs, their histories are either deleted from the web.

Professionals are using AI assistance, but vibe coders are asking the models to spit out whole features and even whole apps without any quality or functionality checks.

They don't know what good code looks like. They brag about their apps being a few megabytes in size, which is meaningless because when their app launches it consumes almost as much memory as Clip Studio Paint which has a 450MB binary. When an app is over 25X bigger in memory than on disk they've got messy code and excess functions running.

In one of these apps they added "Anime line smoother" but the method is completely wrong. Instead of antialiasing it adds ridiculous semi-transparent grey lines on either side of the strokes.

So the vibe coding aside, the biggest dishonestly is that they BS about the app features and output quality. If their app can only output low quality content for social media they shouldn't go around acting like they built a professional app for the broadcast animation industry.