AI coding tools have really turned me off from engaging with the vast majority of startups and personal projects online. It used to be that people who had the skills and dedication to launch something of their own could generally be trusted to follow security best practices and be careful with user data, sometimes even more so than large companies. Now it's more likely that someone with marginal technical skills is "vibe coding" to try and make a quick buck.
Completely false about personal projects. The median github repo was crap long before genai. The superstar open source libraries often have high quality, but it is a steep cliff after that. Anybody can push to pypi or npm and I've seen so much crap there too that I was tempted to install after a search, until I looked into the code. That's what genai is trained on.
I suspect it's a long way from what it's meant here by "online personal projects i can interact with" and "median github/pypy/npm crap".
Speaking for myself, I remember a time when personal ("indy") projects had the reputation of being better cared for than big company products before online repositories were even a thing.
Can you give some examples? Because personally, I don't remember any period where personal projects weren't normally hacked together, but my experience only goes back to the early 2000s. It would be interesting to hear your memories of it.
I'm not alone in this and we don't need to go much further back than the early '00s! Great time to sample from.
I had a Mac at the time so here's some from the top of my head that I remember being very popular: Quicksilver and LaunchBar, NetNewsWire, Coda and Transmit (anything from Panic, really),
Growl, AudioHijack and Soundflower, Unarchiver, iA Writer... these were insanely well crafted apps with no real competition from big companies in that regard.
Apple infamously capitalized on this indy development phenomenon with the creation of the AppStore model in 2008, first on the iPhone and later on the Mac.
Outside of this ecosystem I can remember WinAmp, Total Commander, WinRar, 7-zip, VLC, Foobar, mIRC, Paint.NET, μTorrent, FileZilla, Reaper, SublimeText...
Macromedia was a medium sized company with huge global success for their size, and they had some of the best software out there at the time before their acquisition. Adobe immediately polluted it.
Thoughtful, ad-free, bloat free, passion-driven software with attention to detail, good design and great performance was an attribute of small independent teams, not big software companies.
It's put me off sharing my code online. Having a project forked is one thing, having someone "vibe coding" my code verbatim and thinking they did it themselves is another.
Yep. I don't even put code that's related to business in private github repos any more; everything goes in a private git forge running on a NUC in my office.
> It used to be that people who had the skills and dedication to launch something of their own could generally be trusted to follow security best practices and be careful with user data
