This is why you should not install any of the vibe coded apps that get advertised in here regularly. You’re just creating a liability for yourself.
@[email protected] given the new post tag requirements, please edit your title to include [AIT].
A solid 40% of projects get abandoned, that its about double for purely vibecoded is unsurprising. Purely generated is completely unmaintainable. At least they realized it within 6 months I suppose.
I try to not be hostile towards AI-assisted FOSS projects, but I remain incredibly wary of it for this reason (it being abandonedware) and because if the dev themselves don’t know why they have a piece of code in their project how can I trust that there’s not some obvious security holes. Like yes, it’s FOSS, “so you can check it yourself,” and if I’m seriously considering using the software then I will do a cursory code-review. But I do enough of that in my day-job (and at least I get paid for this), I don’t want to do it with my hobby too. I’m just so tired of all this AI/LLM nonsense to the point where it’s been months since I’ve added anything to my little homelab or have even bothered checking out any of the new projects coming out
I shall share a personal experience and opinion, I’m telling y’all early so you can skip it if you want.
I finished several projects with AI assisting me in my work. As someone who has masters degree in AI (done before current AI craze) I really wanted to see the new thing in action, even though I knew it was over-advertised and over-hyped.
AI is a good tool for a programmer in the same sense as Google Search is a good tool for a programmer. And just like haphazardly copying code from stackoverflow doesn’t make you a good programmer, neither does AI. Anyone who tries to either have agentic AI write everything for him, or just copies code from LLM will eventually end up with confusing mess that even experienced programmers will have hard time to work with.
AI is good for quick questions - what is the data type, what is syntax here and there, what library provides specific feature… but terrible at making, expanding and managing large projects. Few years back I would tell my peers “just google it, you will get better results” but sadly Google Search entered such a terrible enshittification phase even before AI craze, that in my personal experience it’s faster and more accurate to ask LLM most coding questions.
Purely vibe coded apps are abandoned because the proper answer to “can a vibe coder add feature X to his app” is sadly and expectedly “fuck you”. My current project - Baba Yaga was created with AI assist, by treating AI like Google Search and occasionally as a junior dev to re-write boring parts (that could have been done with a script probably). If all LLMs got shut down tomorrow, my workflow would barely change, I would just start complaining about current state of Google Search a bit more.
Thank you for Baba Yaga, anything starring Baba Yaga gets my full endorsement. (I can fix her, I just know it!)
It’s an esoteric knowledge and tools app. My wife loves esoteric stuff so I combed through several old alamachs on magic to build this.
Not many people know that “Baba Yaga” is the real name of the song, not “Teenage Wasteland”.
Communits shits on vibe coded projects calling them slopcode Projects shut down
See! They are just garbage liability! Why are they hitting themselves lol?!?!
Look, I think there’s probably a charitable and uncharitable read for this.
The charitable read is that people are excited to be able to bring their projects to fruition and want to share it, but don’t realise how much structure is required around that.
There’s probably also a selection pressure that forces most projects into that same shape of “we built”, “we shipped”, “curious to hear your thoughts”.
Reddit is rife with that lingo, but Reddit is also probably 3/4 of the way to Moltbook now.
The other reading is to just assume that this is a symptom of the same influencer hustle culture / LinkedIn brain that’s everywhere in mainstream.
I also think - with enough engineering discipline, project management skills and QC audits, someone competent (but who otherwise lacks programming syntax and fluency) could use AI to create something worthwhile, safe and sane. To my understanding, that’s what PMs do IRL.
Obviously, I’m not saying that most people who vibe code do that or there won’t be bugs or issues. OTOH, you can also say that for hand-coded projects.
Adjacently, there’s also been a trend towards harassment of FOSS developers that’s almost the mirror image of this - the same lack of accountability, just aimed in the opposite direction.
If you didn’t pay for it (and I don’t mean throwing $10 into a ko-fi link, once) don’t expect 24hr Zendesk ticket support. As Bluey is fond of reminding us: you get what you get and you don’t get upset.
Slop code isn’t an AI problem. It’s a people problem.
Some people want to be programmers. We enjoy the process.
These people just want attention. Or have been conned into the idea that with AI everything is easy.
these are people who “have an idea for an app” that pester devs to build their dumbass ideas.
It’s more like they want a portfolio to sell at an interview, and since entry-level hires are getting pinched by AI, they’re screwed either way
For me, it’s been super helpful to write personalized things quickly that I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Are these things I plan on maintaining for decades? Hell no. But there is no current solution, this isn’t a commercial product, and I always have the code in case I want to make adjustments in the future.
I’m generally anti-ai but this is kind of exactly what vibe coding is for.
Someone has a problem right now and there is no tool to fix their problem how they want it fixed, so they throw some shit together for personal use and maybe someone else can use it if they want idgaf.
Why would they maintain that? It does what they need it to, when they need it. Usually these tools are very basic.Usually these tools are very basic.
If you read this community in the last weeks you’d know that slopcoders don’t stop at basic projects.
I think that compresses the nuance too much. I think of vibe coding like this:
Back in the day, the C64 bedroom coder wasn’t trying to “disrupt” anything. They were making something that worked for them, modifying example code (usually…poorly) and then sharing it. That’s how the demo scene started. I was there Gandalf, 3000 years ago.
The pride was in the craft, not the pitch deck.
The difference between that and the “we shipped” crowd isn’t that the C64 coders don’t want recognition - it’s that they weren’t substituting the performance of shipping for the thing itself.
Or using a woodworking analogy; you want people to appreciate the dovetail joint, not the Instagram reel of you cutting it.
If you made the dovetail joint, it’s obvious. Does which tool you used particularly matter? Shouldn’t I independently assess the quality of the joint regardless?
It’s very trendy right now to be anti-ai everything, and I get that, but we’re at risk of missing the forest for the trees here.
AI is a force magnifier and it’s not going anywhere. Take the same due diligence with projects you see here you do with other areas of your life - if it sounds too good to be true etc etc.
I hate being the wowser police on this, but from where I sit both the “FuckAI” and “we just shipped… curious to hear” crowds have the same issue.
I’m in the “Fuck AI” crowd even though I currently heavily use LLMs, specifically for the reason that slopcoders, techbros and memelords destroy the planet.
I’m in the same boat as those people and that’s specifically why I hate it.
Then you’re not actually against AI, you’re against hustle culture, influencers and unsustainable practices.
I’m 300% against that myself.
What I don’t like is when nuance gets compressed for sake of point scoring, tribalism or as an end run for due diligence. Not saying you did that BTW.
I don’t disagree necessarily, but they shouldn’t be uploading / sharing one-off projects they don’t intent to maintain.
That is a bit of an open source philosophy difference.
Is it better that everyone has open source everything so that anyone who finds the one-off useful can benefit from it?
Or is the software actually not provided “as-is” like the license states and on releasing open source software the community deserves regular updates?
I think that second option is a very entitled path. We are not entitled to the continued used free labor of a random person on the internet.
Yes, but there’s a difference between having your source and binaries available on github and submitting to an app store like flathub.
I don’t really agree. If you have a tool to do a thing, share it in case someone else could benefit, just be open about what it is.
Vaporware is never not a thing.
I thought vaporware was announced or promised code that never materializes, or shows up much later than claimed. Often used by big companies to squash competition, who typically have very real solutions available.
That’s one example, yes. My point is we like to invent new ways to call out the same shit. Vibe coded projects that get abandoned within half a year are just another example of vaporware, just a new take on the concept.
I’m not surprised. If you didn’t have to will to properly build it yourself, you won’t’ have the will to properly maintain it.
There was a Ted Talk a while back (I can’t remember who) where they said “I have always wanted to give a Ted Talk… but when I got selected to do this I realized that what I really wanted was to say I had given a Ted Talk”. Meaning they want to be known as someone who had given a Ted Talk, not actually go through the process of writing and delivering the Talk.
People who write open source code do it because they like the process of writing, just like an author enjoys writing books. LLMs are for people who just want to be able to say they have written a book. People who slop-code aren’t actually interested in learning how to code. Which is a fine toy for them to play with, but not sustainable (or reliable for others to use).
At some point the project also just gets hard to maintain with AI, you burn ever increasing tokens the bigger a project gets and AI produces awful code for the purpose of maintenance by hand. Once the bugs start rolling in they realise the AI can’t fix them, they certainly can’t afford to have it constantly load the entire project as context and they don’t know how to fix it themselves and the tech debt produced is immense. So the projects get shut down.
It’s late and so maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see the part of the article that compares the abandon rate of slopcode with the overall abandon rate. Not saying that the premise is wrong or anything, but you can’t tell how bad something is unless you can compare it with the norm.
Also it’s again the false sense of security pf “if you don’t use vibed apps you’ll be fine”, making people forget basic security procedures.
I, for instance, had a service vulnerable and discontinued without noticing for months. It was something 100% made before LLM was a thing. Still had unpatched vulnerabilities and the project was abandoned. It was my fault for not checking more often is the services I host are safe or not.
I would guess that the key difference is that vibe coded apps can get to a more or less working state a lot quicker, while other apps are likely to be abandoned before it’s done.
Though in either case I’d always be careful with new projects. If it’s just a single guy that’s been working on something for less than a year and only have a handful of GitHub stars, I probably wouldn’t install it.
The pre-LLM-effort-was-a-filter argument holds up, but I think what effort was really filtering for was why someone built the thing. High effort filtered out “this seemed fun for a weekend” projects. LLMs just surfaced that those were always the majority.
The better filter is: does this project serve a specific audience that genuinely needs it, or is it a demo of what you can do with Claude?
What I look for now:
- Specific problem for a specific group of people (not “general-purpose LLM wrapper”)
- Open core (MIT or something that lets the community carry it if the author walks)
- Revenue model or institutional backing (someone has to keep the lights on)
- Evidence the author understands what they shipped, not just LLM output committed wholesale
We build CircuitForge, self-hosted tools for navigating opaque systems (job markets, government benefits, insurance). The architecture is deterministic-first: eligibility checks, validation, and data pipelines are rule-based and grounded in structured data, so the LLM is drafting from a clean, repeatable foundation rather than hallucinating into a void. That also means we can run smaller, specifically fine-tuned models instead of throwing a frontier model at everything and hoping for the best. Smaller models run on consumer hardware, which cuts hosting cost and shrinks the privacy risk surface significantly. Humans approve before anything acts. Pipeline layer is MIT and lives on Forgejo. There’s a full devops stack, a real business model, and I use these tools every day. We’re also actively collaborating with other devs and always looking for contributors.
The people using these tools actually need them. That’s the commitment signal that doesn’t evaporate when the novelty wears off.
Dammit…did you have to pivot this into a pitch?
This reads a little like a LinkedIn post.
Fair point, I’ll own it. Dropping a project link in a thread about slopcode is going to read as a pitch, and I needed to promote or nothing will ever happen.
That said, I figured showing a concrete example was more useful than just adding another opinion to the pile. If you want to pull the repo (https://git.opensourcesolarpunk.com/Circuit-Forge/peregrine), the structure is there to review. There’s a deterministic pipeline underneath the LLM layer (eligibility checks, form validation, deadline tracking all run without LLM involvement), CI with test coverage, and a fine-tuned model approach that keeps inference on local hardware where possible.
The hard part wasn’t the LLM layer, it was the plumbing around it that keeps the LLM in an advisory role instead of a decision-making one. That design constraint is what I wanted to show, not just “look, I made a thing.”
Also, fair warning: my day job involves writing docs and reports for corporate clients, so the LinkedIn voice leaks in whether I want it to or not. Working on it.
Replying to this post with an AI slop comment takes some balls, mate
Ha, the irony isn’t lost on me. But the comment was mine, not generated. The project does use LLMs as a tool (that’s the point of it), but “uses LLMs” and “is slop” aren’t the same thing. The repo is public if you want to check the commit history and structure rather than take my word for it.
I made the mistake of installing Starling recently, not realizing how it was made. I contributed a PR to it, write a few issues describing the bugs, and since then there’s been absolutely no activity from the creator.
That’s fine, they are under no obligation to work for free. But I wouldn’t have installed it if I knew it was abandonware.
Seems like your PR was merged by the creator? If you are mad that the creator isn’t doing anything with THEIR OWN project, fork it and fix it yourself… No need to get pissy and make a full complaint post in here about it.
It doesn’t sound like OP is mad at the creator, but annoyed at the increased number of projects that are abandoned
It’s hard to judge the longevity of a project, and LLMs can make a project look more stable and professional than it is. It’s fair to feel annoyed if you mess up that call and move your workflow to something that gets abandoned.
Disagreed. You should blast and air everyone’s embarassing trash as loud as possible so no one misses it.
No one got “mad” or “pissy” or filed a complaint. I feel they they were very explicit that it was not a complaint.
Are there any obvious signs of it being vibe coded that I’m missing?
In my experience, projects not being very active, especially small ones by a single person, isn’t anything new that has much to do with LLMs, it was always that way for hobby projects. And it was inactive for only about a month now, with the author replying within one day before that. I have a few hobby projects myself and don’t reserve time every month to work on them or check on their repos.
No obvious signs, nope. It wasn’t until I started using it in earnest that I got suspicious and then when trying to work on the code it became very clear.
This in my experience is the hallmark of a vibe coded project. Individual pieces of code can be perfectly fine, but when you zoom out into an overall structure things get weird. Design patterns changing, same/similar problems solved in different, sometimes conflicting ways.
Been working on a project like that at work. Initially I enjoyed the change of pace, but as I realised that there’s no coherence at all in the project structure my joy turned into frustration.
To me, the most frustrating thing is that you can’t ask someone why something is done in a particular way, because no decision was ever made because no one was there to make a decision. Things just happened.
If you have access to their git, watch out for the commit history. Check how much code each commit is introducing and/or editing and how fast they are, and how many times these big commits happen.
If you see a project with big commits in very short interval of times, it’s a sign that it was vibe coded
As Linus Torvalds said, give the compiler some credit.
Hardly an issue with generated code. You could say the same about projects before LLMs were widely used for code generation: “most projects are abandoned within months of release”. The difference now is the scale and how some people feel about it.
There is a crucial difference though, vibe coding enables people who are neither interested nor capable of understanding what is involved in maintaining a piece of software. Before vibe coding it didn’t even come to this situation: if you can’t write software you don’t need to maintain it. While there were bad coders and bad maintainers before, the numbers have now increased dramatically because everyone can pretend to be a software dev these days.
Most hand-coded projects are “abandoned” within months of release, but this often happens because the project is done, not because the project outgrew the capabilities of the LLM and the vibecoder is too incompetent to fix the accrued technical debt themselves.
Disagree. Most projects are never “done”. Whether that is defined by the user or by the users, there are nearly always things to work on. Maintainers just lose interest or don’t bother. This is as old as open source and it has nothing to do with LLMs, it’s only aggravated by it.
Nah, most projects where just abandoned. Most projects never reached maturity and where abandoed in like weeks if not days. Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever. LLM’s just removed the hurdle to start something “simple” so now the problem just grew in size.
Look at the amount of 0 to 10 star github repos that are open source and had no commits since ever.
Plenty, possibly most, of those do exactly what they were built to do and nothing more or less. I have a couple of dozen such repos myself.
Hmm, I think we are running both on assumptions. This would need some data to be analyzed to actually have a clear picture.
