On one hand, I sympathize with the concern and desire for transparency. After all, vulnerabilities easily missed by AI can have devastating effects on someone’s privacy and infrastructure. On the other hand, should we really be any more hesitant over a vibe coded project than an app launched by someone whose GitHub profile links to their Neocities page (no shade intended)?
The answer is “yes.” Neocites is chill. Vibe coded software that maybe works is not.
“Vibe coded” basically means software built on vibes/feelings rather than solid engineering principles - it’s the “eh, it works on my machine” approach whre testing and security are afterthoughts, which is why it’s particularly risky for self-hosted stuff that handles your data.
It’s way worse than security being an “afterthought”, most of these projects have no afterthought at all. No human review, poor if any testing, rife with race conditions, bad or no error handling, bad or no human readability standards, etc.
But that isn’t even the problem. The deeper and more concerning issue is that these vibe coders iterate very quickly and drown out by volume any meaningful human review. Just like ai-driven content and web scraping, ai vibe coding is making human-generated code less viable because it iterates more slowly.
I had never heard of Neocities so I took a look. Hmmmm…I sure am glad we have advanced past that point of website creation, or at least some have. Way too much gaudy animation.
I think what’s most telling is- if you use it then what do you care about putting “made with ai” on a flair? Are you ashamed?