"Just Fucking Ship It" (Or: On Vibecoding)

that's an easily verifiable lie. the author says the developer is not interested in fixing it just 3 comments above this one. why are you lying?

reporting this to Apple doesn't make sense either. Apple doesn't develop this app. Christian Monfiston develops this app.

There are plenty of ways to sandbox things for a particular use case.

LLMs are still incredibly useful under these constraints.

The dev is making money from his prompted output—he can pay for his own education if he chooses to receive an education, but you have boundary issues if you want to force someone to be educated. This is what op realized that you didn't—you usually cannot force someone to learn or take responsibility for their behaviour as a bystander, you can only document it and attempt to get help from someone more able to do so once they've got all the facts. Do I agree with the method completely? No, but what's done is done.

What is necessary here isn't an education, it's personal development and emotional maturity, which comes with experience and thus comes through time, allowing accountability for mistakes. You can't teach that to someone who isn't ready for it who doesn't want to learn it.

I was a young dickhead too once, I know them when I see them. You only have to see their tweets to realize they are a young dickhead.

We go back to likening it to a kid finding their father's gun or stealing condoms from their old man. Sure, they can produce a child when it turns to shit, but the time to have learned is before, not after. After? It's about taking responsibility for your actions. The action has been taken, the consequences must now be dealt with as per law.

What should happen? Apple should take the app down immediately and an internal investigation should be started. The host should follow their policies on ToS breaches and account termination and report it to the relevant authorities to protect their own legal interests. As for the dev? I personally don't care, we are far beyond that moment now. What about the users? Will they be informed? What's the scale? Are their passwords compromised too?

Complete assholes can build things—why should we give them energy to build things that serve their own asshole agenda? It's an unoriginal, derivative slop app. If the dev wants to learn, they can pay for an education, but they'd be better off seeking legal counsel immediately.

Anyone can make software. But not everybody should with the level of personal development they're at in any given moment. It's an ever-moving target. Teen pregnancy or in young adolescence? Disaster. Pregnancy in thirties? Normal and can deal with it. Time changes things. Sometimes. For some people.

Romanticising what happened to you in the '90s helps nobody. It's 2025. There are laws to protect people from things like this, and Apple slipped up big time in approving this in the first place. There also weren't the vast syllabi in place in the '90s, the embarrassment of riches in readily available educational materials beginning at free or cheap either. The dev can pay for an LLM, so he can pay for an education if he wants one.

The dev wanted a shortcut though because he is lazy. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Op is young too, but op is clearly intelligent and well-intentioned. There's no money in him having written the blog post, and even if it misses the mark on several levels for me, I understand what they're trying to do. The dev? Greedy and lazy with zero regard for their users, law, and shirks accountability.

If you want to educate anyone, educate op who wrote the blog post, their heart is at least in the right place, but obviously young too. It happens to all of us.

Despite being an ancient one, you too perhaps have some personal development to work on, despite your greater number of years. You immediately jump down the throat of people you incorrectly perceive to be shit-talking using AI to code, and that's because it clearly touches something you're insecure about as you do this: https://x.com/ProgramWithAI

If you're so sure of yourself and that what happened to you is so great, where is your own confidence? The inability to engage with the topic at hand yet consistently attempting to make it about something else entirely screams insecurity or abusing an LLM to parse everything for you. The loudest people are frequently the least confident.

If you don't see what's wrong with what the dev did or what Apple failed to do then that says it all. If you're using these tools to prompt your way into being a dev and seeing these problems too then perhaps you should feel unconfident. I would be quaking in my boots at seeing someone else go through a "that could have been me with a different roll of the dice" kind of scenario.

Don't mistake vibe coders for developers. They're frequently prompt engineers LARPing as devs. Likewise, musicians are not always composers, and DJs are not always musicians. Totally different disciplines. Loaded digital guns in the hands of young dickheads is not "fantastic"—it's a disaster of unprecedented scale. "Us senior devs" are the father figures and they've gotten access to not just one gun, but the entire global armory with the inevitable lack of judgement capabilities typical of someone their age.

A blog post is going to be the least of the dev's concerns, frankly. The likely legal shitstorm that's probably coming his way is going to make your comments here look bizarre.

Those didn't fail, but they're certainly not used by non-technical people. That was my point: that all technologies that previously promised to make software development accessible for non-technical people didn't deliver on that promise, and that they're used by software engineers today. I would chalk up the Low-Code and No-Code tools as general failures, since neither business people nor engineers want to use them.

> In the context of people not learning "real programming", you can equate LLMs to say, wordpress plugins or making a squarespace site.

I don't think that's an accurate comparison, as website builders only cover a small fraction of what's possible with "real programming". Web authoring and publishing tools have existed since the dawn of the web, and the modern ones simply turned it into a service model.

LLMs OTOH allow creating any type of software (in theory). They're much broader in scope, and lower the skill requirements to create general-purpose software much more than any previous technology. The software in TFA was an iOS app. This is why they're a big deal, and why we're seeing scam artists and grifters pump out these low-effort applications in record time and volume. They were already enabled by WordPress and Squarespace, and there are certainly a lot of scam and spam sites on the web thanks to website builders, but their scope, reach and productivity got multiplied by LLMs.

> If we care about the security of it all, then let's build the platforms to have LLMs build secure applications.

That's easier said than done, if it's possible at all. Security, privacy, and bug-free software is not something that can be automated, at least with current technology. It requires great care and attention to detail from expert humans, which grifters have zero interest in, and non-expert non-grifters don't have the experience or patience to do. Vibe coding, after all, is the idea that you keep pasting errors to the LLM and prompting it until the software on the surface works as you expect it to. Code is just the translation layer for the LLM to write and interpret; vibe coders don't want to know about it.

Could we encode some general security and privacy hints in the LLM system prompt so that it can check for specific issues? Sure. It will never be exhaustive, though, so it would just give a false sense of security.

> As far as the OP goes, these kind of security issues due to hardcoded credentials are basically the hallmark of someone shipping a (mobile|web) app for the first time, LLMs or not.

Agreed. What I think you're not taking into account is the fact that there is a large swath of the population who just doesn't care about this. The only thing they care about is having an easy way to pump out a service that attracts victims who they can quickly exploit in some way. Once that service is no longer profitable, they'll replace it with another. What LLMs have given these people is an endless revenue stream with minimal effort.

This is not the same group of people who cares about software, the product they're building, and their users. Those are a small minority of the new generation of software developers who will seek out best practices and figure out how to use these tools for good. Unfortunately, I don't think they will ever become experts at anything other than interacting with an LLM, but that's a separate matter.

So the key point is: building high quality software starts with caring. Good practices that ensure high quality are discovered by intentionally seeking out established knowledge, or by trial and error. But the types of issues we're seeing here are not because the developer is inexperienced and made a mistake—it's because they don't care. Which should be criticized and mocked in public, and I would argue regulated and fined, depending on the severity. I even think that a software development license is even more important today than ever before.