This presupposes that the OSS creator even wants users in the first place, which might not always be the case as it could be personal software; and that these users actually want these features, as many do not want analytics, ads, and A/B tests in your app.
I guess in the same way that one might presuppose a boat wants water?
If a piece of software doesn’t have users and the developers don’t care about the papercuts they are delivering, I would argue what they have created is more of an art project than a utility.
Science research without obvious practical application can still be important and valuable.
Art works without popular appeal can become highly treasured by some.
Open source software doesn't have to be ambitious to be worthwhile and useful. It can be artful, utilitarian or a artifact of play. Commercial standards shouldn't be the only measure of good software.
It's more like building your own boat then someone else coming along and saying it'll never compete with a cruise ship because it doesn't have a water slide and endless buffet; sometimes, things in the same category can serve wholly different purposes.
Agreed, desktop frameworks have been getting really good these days, such as Flutter, Rust's GPUI (which the popular editor (and more importantly a competitor to a webview-based app in the form of Electron) Zed is written with), egui, Slint and so on, not to mention even the ability to render your desktop app to the web via WASM if you still wanted to share a link.
Times have changed quite a bit from nearly 20 years ago.
How is that an absurd bar? If you're handwriting code, you'd need to know what you actually want to write in the first place, hence you understand all the code you write. Therefore the code the AI produces should also be understood by you. Anything else than that is indeed vibe coding.
A lot of developers don't actually understand the code they write. Sure nowadays a lot of code is generated by LLMs, but in the past people just copied and pasted stuff off of blogs, Stack Overflow, or whatever other resources they could find without really understanding what it did or how it worked.
Jeff Atwood, along with numerous others (who Atwood cites on his blog [1]) were not exaggerating when the observed that the majority of candidates who had existing professional experience, and even MSc. degrees, were unable to code very simple solutions to trivial problems.
its an absurd bar if you are being a uncharitable jerk like i was, the layers go deep, and technically i can claim I have never fully grasped any of my code. It is likely just a dumb point to bring up tbh.
I saw your reply to another comment [0], I see what you mean now. By "understand each line of code" I meant that one would know how that for loop works not the underlying levels of the implementation of the language. I replied initially because lots of vibe coding devs in fact do not read all the code before submitting, much less actually review it line by line and understand each line.
Well yeah, I'm not sure why that's sad. One can't find all edge cases at the beginning but only through usage of the app, and fix them over time. Be glad at least someone is using the app as that means the role of software is being fulfilled, as a tool to help people accomplish some goal, because much software written isn't even used by a single person.
Would you call titles of other media click bait too, like 1984 or Gone with the wind? Sometimes an article doesn't have to have a literal title, sometimes it's an artistic decision to have a more vague title that nevertheless relates to the media.
What about Crystal? If it's just the aesthetic beauty you want then it might be a good fit as it's similar syntax yet statically typed which leads into more efficient compiled code.
Requiring static type annotations is likely a dealbreaker for many. I wish Matz had gone the route of python3 and allowed _optional_ inline type annotations instead of the mess that is RBS.
Crystal is great and I think it nailed statically typing in a Ruby like language, but I've always been wary of day job use of the language because it doesn't have a significant user base.
If this stabilizes and gets networking support, there are definitely projects that I'll be able to use this for, and the buy-in will be easier than proposing Crystal.
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