Fuck AI

Calling something "vibe coded" feels similar to calling something "woke". Its used for everything so it lost all meaning.

If I start writing a function name and the coding assistant suggests exactly, character by character, the function signature I would have typed, is that vibecoding? If I ask an agent to check out my classes and create me a json schema from that, what about that? What if I ask it to write me some database connection stuff, boilerplate that is basically directly copy pasted from docs?

The presence of a cursorrules file signifies.. Nothing. Most projects now have a prompt file to store general context, like styling etc. Most programmers use coding assistants. The use of coding assistants does not, in of itself, mean bad quality. Obviously you have to hide it because people get irrationally angry about it.

The blind AI hate does not help. LLMs can be useful. Is it stupid to have an LLM write an email so the other side can use an LLM to summarize it? Yes. Is LLM slop annoying? Yes. That does not mean that everything is bad. If you check out the Developer-sphere, people who have tried coding assistants for a couple years now, the consensus is "overhyped but definitely useful".

Example, read this comment section: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44836879

So a Cursor config file made it into the repo and was later removed and they just declare that this must be a case of trying to obfuscate their vibe coding policy? "They must have moved it to a private repo!" That seems like a logical jump made out of personal bias.

A far more likely case, (and one I've seen in dozens of projects myself) is that someone was using Cursor locally and committed the file by mistake. Then when they realised this, they removed it.

People (especially juniors) commit their .idea or .vscode files all the time. Normally, I catch this at review time, but sometimes it slips by. It's still not great that anyone was using Cursor in the first place, but this alone is hardly evidence of policy or conspiracy.

I dislike using AI when im writing my own code, simply because I do not believe AI is fair use or leads to anything positive for the creators of the works its trained on. I do use it to debug some stuff or get some hints but always double check whether the solution is good afterwards. With that said, if the cursorfile is just a settings file it only proves that someone has used AI in their IDE, the code itself does not necessarily have to be generated by an AI. And even if it were it could still be fine, it all comes down to the developers and the review process. The code is not inherently flawed because an AI wrote it. As long as humans are there to point out, find and prevent issues/security flaws its fine to use.

Here comes the problem though. The term "vibe coding" mainly refers to people with little to no skill as developers, mainly relying on AI to do the heavy lifting. That is very problematic. Thats when security flaws, issues and tech debt start to rack up. I havent looked at the code or researched repo history, but i would believe these devs are better than "vibe coders"

What is ". cursor"?