/R/selfhosted limits vibecoded apps
old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com
HN is obviously very pro-ai and many top-level comments mention that blocking AI submissions will leave r/selfhosted in the digital stone age. That's not at all what they are doing.
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps submitted lately have been simply either very low quality, inferior clones of existing apps, or just incomplete non-sense with a good readme. Redditors are rightfully rejecting that but the trend has been to reject it because it is vibe coded and not for the right reason: the low quality.
In a sense they are protecting ai assisted apps from being lumped in all the crap and auto-rejected by the community.
If you rephrase the announcement as Limiting low-quality/low-effort submissions instead of vibe coded, nobody would object.
I've noticed many posts hitting the hn front page in the last few years trending first on r/selfhosted so there's a good overlap between the communities. Before judging I'd encourage you to take a look. I've discovered many apps I use daily through it (immich, jellyfin, frigate-nvr for examples).
mm i'd actually say its more moderated, lots of cynics/skeptics.
The negative side of this however is the influx of AI generated posts, vibe-coded projects over a weekend and many others. Normally, the community votes with its voice. But with the high amount of posts flooding in every day, we've noticed a more negative and sometimes even hostile attitude towards these kinds of projects.
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I wonder what HN's reception to a similar rule would be.
If you ever want to see how bad vibe coded software can be. This subreddit unfortunately had been a gold mine full of it.
Hoping this turns it around.
Why would I want to take ownership of that for my own security?
It’s also a very good indicator of how invested the author is in the repo. Is this a throwaway weekend project? Is it their “baby” so to speak? Should i even bother asking the author a question if i run into an issue, after all, they didn’t write any of the code so…
> In order to determine the difference (as going by code & commits alone can be a great indicator but by itself does not make a great case for what constitutes a vibe-coded or AI-assisted project) we've set the following guidelines: [...] With obvious signs of vibe-coding*
Gonna be interesting to see how deep those accusation-threads will go, people trying to determine the "obvious signs".
It's a natural backlash of anti AI sentiment.
Eventually they will reverse course as living in seclusion like that often doesn't work very well.
A lot of the little vibe coded self hosted utilities were made by folks with zero software development experience, over a weekend. These are apps where people need to be able to trust them to be exposed to the internet, and trust them with their data. Allowing zero-experience, purely vibe coded software in this environment is a recipe for disaster.
I've no problem with folks vibing their own little tools for use at home, but that doesn't mean it needs to be shared, and it a lot of cases, it probably shouldn't unless you really know what you are doing.
That doesn't change anything IMO.
Software is not defined by how long it takes to make.
Software is not defined by how hard it was to make.
Software is not defined by what pen it was crafted with.
If you want to make a rule against poor or low-quality submissions or poorly reviewed code, just do that.
Are they though? I'd argue the vast majority of even non-AI coded projects talked about on r/selfhosted are ones you would not want exposed publicly, even if they are in theory relatively secure.