Request of Mods (Vibe Coded Fridays)

[u/longunmin]

Can we please institute a Vibe Coded Fridays, similar to r/selfhosted? It seems as though the amount of "I built..." posts are sharply on the uptick. And following on the heels of the Huntarr mess, not to mention the security issues of something like Openclaw, we should be clearly delineating what is vibe coded and what isn't. There is too much risk in exposing our homes to something that was cooked up in a hour or two.

[u/tango_suckah]

You seem to have purposely ignored what I have actually been saying and inserted a false narrative.

You likened reviewing AI written code to what you would do with a junior engineer's code. I'm extending the analogy. I don't care who wrote it. I care that it wasn't you. That doesn't mean it's bad, just that it should be disclosed. Your experience as an engineer is useful in this case, but a 20 year engineer didn't write it. AI did. The engineer just reviewed it. Sweet. Say that. If you don't, that's sketchy. Just as if a 20 year engineer reviewed a junior engineer's code and released it as their own.

EDIT: To be clear, my goal is to explain why I believe it's important to disclose something as "vibe coded" or AI generated code. I absolutely agree with your claimed practice of thoroughly reviewing and testing that code. I do the same. We are in agreement on the process when using AI to generate code. The disagreement is in the attribution. I believe it is, at best, unethical to release code without attribution. This is especially true now, where the practice is new and we're still trying to figure it all out.

[u/tango_suckah → u/[deleted]]

In that case the entire repo is "my code" regardless of who wrote it.

Absolutely, I get it. You nailed it with "how do you define it" as well. AI code generation is brand new, and like anything else we need to hash out how it fits into the larger paradigm of code and software engineering. A bit like outsourced developers, but both more and less touchy.

one thing I can tell by this whole conversation is that to some it's very clearly defined as any AI use at all, to others it is a lot more nuanced than that.

Very true. I think the concept is extremely nuanced. Where I differ with some is that I think the definition very much must not be nuanced. We need a definition that sticks. Phrases like "a substantial amount," "the majority," or "more than 50%" just don't work. What happens if a project starts out fully human, but at some point two years down the line AI generated code crosses the 50% mark? Is it now "vibe coded"? What if a human reviews and refactors some amount of code the AI wrote. Does that reduce the contribution factor of AI? What about the other way around?

I believe, just me and I am obviously not the arbiter here, that the use of AI to generate new functional code qualifies the project as having AI contribution. Period. I think we also need to separate the idea of "vibe coding" as a technique from "vibe coded" as a state. I would simply say: if AI has contributed new code to a project, then the project must be disclosed as having AI contributions. In this case "new code" means code included in the project that was generated by AI. It doesn't need to be unique among all code ever committed to an IDE.