Privacy

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Proton is vibe coding some of its apps. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 days ago by irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50693956

Transcript
A post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying: courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957

It has a reply by the author saying: in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f

given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public

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[–] space_comrade@hexbear.net 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Also I don't think most people understand just how ineffective true vibe coding is. I tried it a few times and could barely get something slightly more complex than a demo todo app working, and even if it was working it was barely prototype level quality of user experience, there is zero chance somebody is deploying vibe coded features into a large, serious production system and not suffering major and immediate consequences because shit just didn't work at all.

The best you're going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

The best you’re going to get out of it is it shortens the amount of time wasted on tiny adjustment to the UI or something.

This gets into the question of what, if anything, AI "should" be used for.

I've heard responses to this go both ways. Some people argue that saving time on repetitive simple tasks is what AI "should" be used for; but other people say that if you can't even do something as simple and repetitive as a tiny adjustment to the UI, you shouldn't be in a development job to begin with; or that you're stealing the work of other programmers who had their code scraped for training data who are not being paid while you are, and that maybe you should be fired and the people who had their code scraped be hired instead.

IDK what the right answer is, I think this is something I will struggle with for ages while the unscrupulous people use AI for everything and anything.