so, a while ago, I have been tricked into trying out a vibe-coded project. "tricked", because it wasn't disclosed anywhere, and just from screenshots and the readme, it looked fine'ish.
it was a small web-app used to upload and download files. you know, kinda like wetransfer, but self-hosted.
I gave it a quick try, and it worked well enough for the use-case I had (requesting one file from a user). except that.. chunked uploading was broken.
oh, and also: the project provided docker containers and a compose file, but.. the uploaded files weren't stored in the volume at all, they were just stored as part of the ephemeral container filesystem. very much a "you had one job, and you failed at it" kind of situation.
there was a github issue mentioning existing upload issues. I left a comment there pointing out the volatile storage, because I'm not a jerk. also, I felt it's kinda important to note somewhere, because that puts users at risk of actually losing data. that was at the end of october. just after leaving the comment, I noticed an earlier comment by the maintainer. it read:
Thanks a lot for reporting this bug! I actually struggled with the same issue during development. The v3.2.5-beta release was meant to fix it for good, sorry it didn’t work as expected. Just so you know, I’m currently working on v3.3.0-beta, where I’m rewriting all the upload/download logic from scratch.
and then it hit me: the maintainer actually had zero clue. looking at their commit history, it's pretty clear that there's very little - if any - architectural thinking. a lot of the commits were just "give up and rebuild everything", because that's what you get from GenAI: when they struggle writing code, they tend to suggest throwing everything away and starting from scratch.
anyway, I rm -rfed that project, but because I commented in a bug, I was still subscribed. just got a notification from the maintainer posting that a new "beta" is out, so of course, I checked out the commits.
the latest real commit:
[REFACTOR] Change upload and download architecture
oh dear. yes. once again, instead of fixing shit, it's just throwing away everything. and, hold your horses:
205 files changed, +28939 -15962
and sure, lots of that is also docs changes and i18n file changes, but it's literally throwing away everything and "writing it" from scratch. the docker container is now also installing and running minio, because of course that's perfectly reasonable to do. and, even funnier: the "important upgrade notes" - clearly AI generated - mention a lot of things, but what they don't mention is that if you already have uploaded files and you just build a new container... well... you'll no longer have uploaded files.
it's a total feverdream, and one of many similar stories I've seen in GenAI-driven projects. call me a hater all you want, but I, for once, am really happy about stories like that. it's been 2.5 years since people yelled at me with "GenAI will take your job in a few months", and they're still so laughably bad, that - as someone who knows how to debug and actually fix shit - am becoming less worried about my career as time goes on.
what wonderful times we're in.
(also, you can probably google these quotes and find the project and the maintainer. don't. don't harass them or their projects. for all I know, they might have the best intentions and are just heavily misguided by the fearmongering/FOMO-driven/hype-driven marketing of GenAI companies.)
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