https://jackalsyn.com/posts/php-up-2026.html

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And /r/ProgrammingLanguages did as well yesterday. It’s looking more like a trend than a bold choice.

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It’s a tough call. The Node ecosystem is a major selling point, removing compatibility will make Ende less appealing for many users.

Maybe the ecosystem needs a common API spec, that packages can test against ? But that’s a lot of unrewarding work, that might go wasted not gain traction.

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IMHO it has worked well for /r/rust/: the signal to noise ratio bounced back up. Though the situation regarding slop repo submissions was probably worse there than on lobste.rs.

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The comparison with compiler/db/vcs, is meant to show that the new ai-tooling tag describes what it is, rather than how it was made. It’s a simple objective category, orthogonal to any “proponents and opponents situation”, that people may be interested in or choose to filter out.

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any ground gained is good ground

That is never true, in any domain. Eventually the cost of the new ground becomes unacceptable.

The result in this case isn’t just losing some potential players, it normalizes a tech that will be used for much more problematic purposes. It’s worth pushing back against even if you don’t play those games.

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Focus on detecting the effect of the cheat, not on blocking it. Server knows how good a player is, if they consistently outperform, or achieve impossible feats, it’s a cheat.

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– This is utter garbage, whatever inferred that moronic code should get its weights checked.

– You’re absolutely right !

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The name of the tag, “vibecoding”, is clearly opinionated against the tech : it relates to a way of using GenAI that is decried even amongst GenAI users. It’s not a neutral term like GenAI is.

I don’t mind the existence of the “vibecoding” tag, I would probably use it if could be applied judiciously, for example on stories about the Bun rewrite. But as it is, it’s applied both too broadly (there’s no indication that the mold rewrite was vibecoded, just AI-assisted) and too haphazardly (missing for example from many Ladybird posts).

IMHO the tag needs to be split.

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GenAI is very unethical and I don’t think we should accept its existence. GenAI as a whole, for any use, should be objected to.

I largely agree with that.

But dogmatically putting everything in the same category makes your message inaudible. The term “slop” predates GenAI, for most people it describes the quality, and they may find that some GenAI output is slop while some other is good. Similar dichotomy with “vibecoding”. If you ignore nuance that people care about, they won’t listen to you.

Also, pushing against GenAI by pointing out bad quality output is quickly becoming ineffective. The tools are improving, people are learning to use them well, and top quality is not always necessary. What we need to point out are the deeper issues: ethical, societal, environmental, etc.

GenAI exists, and will keep growing. If we want to limit the bad consequences, we need to talk to people, not just bluntly reject the tech.

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And it’s frustrating that lobste.rs lumps this into “vibecoding”. Using genAI to help port an existing codebase, that you wrote yourself, carefully reviewing and testing each step, is not the same things as generating a project from the ground up using only prompts and no code review.

There are many things wrong with genAI, I wish we could reverse the usage trend. But we have to stop labeling anything it touches “slop”, there’s high quality stuff out there (FWIW, mold 3.0 looks high quality to me). Using AI assistance is becoming normal, to write browsers, compilers, desktop envs, etc. Anything coming from Google, Red Hat, and many others. If lobste.rs tags it all as “vibecoding”, the tag loses it usefulness.

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It’s not too hard to predict the content of some files. For example I could get my malware to hash the same as the GPL license text. Or I could email you some harmless content, which hash-collides with malware that’s already in your backup system. If github (which shares git refs across repos) didn’t have collision protection, I could fork you project, push my malware to my fork, then send you a clean-looking PR.

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One way to prevent sharing is to cryptographically sign the app’s state with a hardware id, using an external service so the private signing key is not leaked, and a locked down OS so you can’t fake the id or install a hacked app.

Whether that’s how this particular scheme works or not, strong ones always come with pretty serious freedom or privacy issues. You have to choose somewhere between a dystopia and an easily bypassable system. You can get most of the usefulness (preventing access to problematic things) with very simple systems (starting with the “are you overs 18 ?” click-through), and then each loophole you close comes at an increasingly authoritarian cost.

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