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Comment by dboon | Hacker News Reader

This prose feels extremely angry and ungenerous; abstractly, I agree with a lot of the points, but when I read this:

> My conclusion is that OpenCode is clown-car turboslop with a security posture of “let me bend over for you daddy”. Everyone using it should stop using it.

I do not want to keep reading. There are regular people who wrote this software. When did it become normal to talk about open source like this? How would you feel if someone wrote this about some software that you wrote? Reading this article made me feel extremely gross

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I agree with your sentiment, but to answer your question: Since forever. (At least I know examples in the 90's).

In the old days of comp.lang.lisp, there were certain individuals who would really get off on denigrating people who wrote code that was not up to their ivory tower level. Some people left because of it. Others took it as a badge of honor falsely believing that the dressing down was necessary for them to improve their coding skills.

Example of an old discussion on HN about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587045

Poorly socialized people tend to have poorly developed social mores.

And a lot of developers, especially on the internet, tend to be poorly socialized.

Salt that with the fact that they often are more fact-intelligent than the people around them in real life, and you get a propensity to shitpost whenever thry feel it's warranted, especially about technical things.

Calling something "vibe-coded" nowadays is a permission slip to unload on it with hyperbole and insults because you can presume there's no human in the line of fire. I really don't think the people engaging in that kind of rhetoric understand how corrosive it is to the humans who do get caught in the crossfire sometimes, and to themselves for normalizing that kind of behavior.

And even so, when something is truly vibecoded it doesn't mean the vibecoder has not put a lot of love and attention into building the product.

I found this part funny.

> People familiar with OpenCode internals (if you are on the OpenCode dev team I assume this doesn’t include you) might have objected to my python3 example above.

It's funny though. I haven't contributed to OpenCode but if I had I'd still laugh because I have a sense of humor. Don't take everything so seriously.

I promise I'm not normally uptight like this, but there's a difference between having a laugh and whatever this is. Like I said, this feels (a) legitimately angry and (b) in a spit flecked enraged way that has become popular. I guess if you're cool with people calling whatever you work on clown-car turboslop then more power to you.

Author here. Just wanted to say: thank you for posting this. You've given me something to think about, and I regret writing this post the way that I did.

please don't regret writing the post the way you did, I for one enjoy well-written rants

Maybe the important take-away would be to recognize that this was a rant.

Ownership and honesty about things is healthy, as is letting out strong opinions sometimes.

Nothing wrong with saying "I wanted to write a (technically-informed) rant about something that's really bothering me, and I did."

F.ex. "clown-car turboslop" would be fairly polite by the standards of younger Torvalds (though he admittedly recognized later in life that wasn't a great communication style)

Absolutely not. This is what I come to HN for!

Thanks for the reply, I'm sure you're also just a regular person writing about the stuff you like and regardless of whether you end up agreeing with me or deciding that, no, that was exactly the tone you wanted, I appreciate the thought.

> When did it become normal to talk about open source like this?

It's not normal today, but it's also not new, that kind of language has been around for a long time.

> When did it become normal to talk about open source like this?

Why does something being open source absolve it of any sins?

Eventually AI guys are gonna absorb everything, even the old tradition of angry software teardowns...

Shouldn't having all powerful chat bot give you thicker skin, not thinner?

I mean, unless you think AI is conscious and would feel hurt by this, who exactly is harmed here? The prompters? Why? They obviously know the code generated by AI is slop, why would they be hurt by these comments?

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