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Comment by carlgreene | Hacker News Reader

The hardest part about this stuff is that as a user, you don't necessarily know if an app is vibe-coded or not. Previously, you were able to have _some_ reasonable expectation of security in that trained engineers were the ones building these things out, but that's no longer the case.

There's a lot of cool stuff being built, but also as a user, it's a scary time to be trying new things.

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The frequency with which I see contemporary apps updating (sometimes multiple times a day) says there's a change in culture that also makes professionals prone to mistakes.

I get that we'll never ship a perfect release, but if you have to push fixes once a day it seems you've lost perspective.

Vibe coding slopiness is more acceptable now because we've lowered our standards

Devs' newfound ability to patch on the fly is absolutely being overleveraged. It's a wonderful capability to have that can do wonders in terms of disaster mitigation, but it's clearly become a crutch and has resulted in a situation where software has become a horrific amalgamation of haphazardly-developed panic-patches, taking the classic "ball of mud" problem and putting it into overdrive.

Yeah, my trust for new open source projects is in the toilet. Hopefully we will eventually start taking security seriously again after the vibe code gold rush.

> Hopefully we will eventually start taking security seriously again after the vibe code gold rush.

Companies don't take security seriously now (and predating vibe coding)

This applies to all software not just open source.

The hardest part about this stuff is that as a user, you don't necessarily know if an app is vibe-coded or not

Hah. Advert of the year. Can’t really tell the difference anymore huh …

I'm sorry, what?

> Previously, you were able to have _some_ reasonable expectation of security in that trained engineers were the ones building these things

When was this? What world? Did I skip worldlines? Is this a new Universe?

The world I remember is that anybody could write a program and put it on the Internet. Is this not the world you remember?

Further, when those engineers were "trained" ... were there no data breaches before 2022?

Of course there were. Don't be pedantic. Anybody could write a program and put it on the internet. But to get a reasonably polished version with decent features and an enjoyable enough UX for someone to sign up and even pay money more, it generally took people who kind of knew what they were doing.

Of course shortcuts were taken. They always were and always will be. But don't try to compare shipping software today to even just 3 years ago.

Yes - AI has completely destroyed the set of "Signals" people used to judge quality of much software. They weren't ever 100% accurate, sure, but they were often pretty good heuristics for "level of care", what the devs considered important (or didn't consider important) and similar.

And I mean that as both "end user" software signals, and "library" signals for other devs.

I assume that set of signals will slowly be updated. If one of those ends up being "Any Use of AI At All" is still an open question, depending on if the promised hype actually ends up meeting capability as much as anything.

This is true beyond software. It used to be that the proof of the thinking process was in the resulting artifact. No longer can you estimate from the existence of a piece of text and the level of polish behind it that the apparent author has put at least a reasonable amount of thought into it. This applies to comments, blogs, emails, and most troublingly I've seen this happen at my job with things like requirement specs. Now, the veneer of quality makes it much harder to know what is the appropriate amount of skepticism to judge the contents with. And it's too tiring to be maximally skeptical about everything.

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