It's enough - vibecoding tag crossed from useless to harmful
272 points by viraptor
272 points by viraptor
The vibecoding tag has been getting more and more useless for a while now. It lost the original meaning as the culture of software engineering with LLMs matured a bit. It got silly when posts talking about LLMs in general got tagged. It got useless when posts even mentioning some project created with LLMs in passing got tagged. Now it actually got harmful to the community when tagging posts turns away very valuable members https://lobste.rs/c/vecuxj
I sighed and moved on for a while now as almost everything gets tagged - you can skip a word. But now it not only carries no signal whatsoever, it turns away people creating original technical content - which is what I assume anti-vibecoding people would actually like to see more of.
Please split it or kill it. But we'd be better off without what exists today.
Added: To be clear, I totally support people filtering out llm-generated or llm-centric posts. But right now everyone loses. And every day we lose a little bit more. Whether it's an original, interesting article that turns out to be nth-degree related to llms and filtered out, or a community member annoyed by this recurring problem and leaving us with even fewer actual non-llm-centric entries.
I agree with the reasons the OP stated, but what bothers me even more is how the discussion on lobsters has degraded.
So often, the top voted comments on a post are low-effort, anti-intellectual labeling of things as vibecoding or slop. I've used the word "slop" in the past to describe low effort work, I think it could be a useful word. But when we have a heckler's chorus insisting that anything that uses agents is slop getting consistently upvoted, that's anti-intellectual (https://lobste.rs/c/rqmtmc).
Lobsters has gotten much more content free, and I don't think the problem is people posting coding projects built with AI, it is people grandstanding about how much they hate slop, over and over again.
I blocked lobsters on my work laptop with /etc/hosts, and I wonder if I should block it on my home machine as well.
Lobsters has gotten much more content free, and I don't think the problem is people posting coding projects built with AI,
From the topicality guidelines:
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader's next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
I find the "project I made with LLMs" posts to fall short of these topicality guidelines. Specifically I find it annoying that half of the LLM fans here will tell me that everything current will mean nothing in 5-10 years while the other half just post LLM output of the day projects. I find it hard to see how both can be relevant to my software development.
Most of the LLM output of the day projects fit much better into these off-topic examples:
... entrepreneurship, management, news about companies that employ a lot of programmers, investing, world events, ... personal productivity systems, ...
From the topicality guidelines:
Some rules of thumb for great stories to submit: Will this improve the reader's next program? Will it deepen their understanding of their last program? Will it be more interesting in five or ten years?
I find the "project I made with LLMs" posts to fall short of these topicality guidelines.
These are rules of thumb, not a closed list of authoritative tests that summarily determine topicality.
If someone posts a project made with LLM usage, it might still nudge me to learn some things or ideas that I wouldn't have thought of before, even if the specific LLM-generated code will not be of interest to me. If someone posts an article that happened to touch LLMs in some way (and thus earn the vibecoding brand), that has absolutely no bearing on whether I'd find the actual content interesting (and often, I do, as is with the titular case of this thread).
It is absolutely baseless to claim that any kind of content associated with LLMs (to the extent that is required for a Lobsters submission to gain a vibecoding tag, i.e. not much at all) necessarily or likely fails the topicality check.
It is absolutely baseless to claim that any kind of content associated with LLMs (to the extent that is required for a Lobsters submission to gain a vibecoding tag, i.e. not much at all) necessarily or likely fails the topicality check.
Nothing I said could possibly be construed as making this argument. You get zero credit for building up a strawman just to tear it down.
As someone who is trying to filter out posts that talk about vibecoded projects or practices related to the use of generative AI, while still being interested in posts that talk about the societal consequences of AI and other technologies such as machine learning, the current overloading of the vibecoding/ai tags is the worst of all worlds.
I’ve seen posts talking about the societal consequences of AI basically fall into my filter and off an engagement cliff because they were tagged as vibecoding, but posts directly about LLM usage skirt filtering by being tagged only as ai. As such I’ve had to filter both, and just take the fact that I won’t see any of the interesting ‘talking around AI’ posts anymore.
Edit: which, ironically, now includes this post.
while still being interested in posts that talk about the societal consequences of AI and other technologies such as machine learning
+1
This is one reason why I am not using a filter to remove "vibecoding" tagged posts.
Since you were able to so clearly distinguish these two different concepts of articles/submission, it seems like the best option would be to create two separate tags to differentiate between these. For example, vibecoding for code written with the help of LLM/ML/AI systems, and a ai for posts discussing the development/engineering/societal impact of LLM/ML/AI systems, but not their usage in creating something.
It seems to me that ai currently is mainly used for news (this is just a cursory glance so may be completely wrong) which should not end up on lobsters anyways according to (my understanding of) the rules.
still being interested in posts that talk about the societal consequences of AI and other technologies such as machine learning
While I am in the same boat, I do wonder if those kind of articles are “likely to improve your next program”, which I think the guidelines call for, or if such articles are off topic here?
Two things about that: I think that phrase in isolation is given too much weight by some folks as a way to dismiss anything that isn't explicitly about writing software; and I think discussing the societal impacts of tools can absolutely improve someone's next programming endeavor. Improve the code quality? Maybe not. Improve its impact on society as a whole? Maybe! A lot of things can improve the next program someone works on, but also that's only one of a few example questions in the guidelines to help guide topicality. It's not the only question.
"Vibecoding" has a derogatory meaning and tagging anything that's seemingly even remotely LLM-related with it just has the effect of effectively insulting a whole lot of posts. I don't see how this is a good thing just because of a long tradition (of using a tag to mean things that it does not actually mean).
The tag is about a year old and on the post introducing it people pointed out that it was inaccurate. The tag is supposed to be a neutral tag to be used for any discussion of using coding agents, but the word vibecoding has a negative connotation. It seems like renaming (to ai-usage) or redefining the tag (to “vibe-based LLM use”) would be very reasonable.
Some people in this thread argue that all posts about LLM usage should have a tag with a negative connotation attached, because LLM usage is negative. The issue with this line of thinking is that, as things stand, they are attempting to leverage the confusion between the intended and actual usage and meaning of the tag. For example, if person A tags a story with “vibecoding” as a neutral descriptor, and the author of the story (B) takes offense, because of “vibecoding”’s negative connotation, person C might say “well, the author’s LLM use was bad. Who cares that A didn’t mean it that way, I got the outcome I want.” The issue with this dynamic isn’t that B is offended. The issue is that C is arguing at the expense of A. Having a tag with a negative connotation isn’t bad because it hurts AI user’s feelings, it’s bad because it’s impossible for someone with a neutral or nuanced opinion on AI to accurately tag things without appearing to support a more vitriolic position. Rather than hurting LLM users, this hurts the community as a whole by leading to endless arguments about who should and shouldn’t be given the thorny LLM tag.
I’m actually optimistic about this moving forward. Because most people, AI-proponents and haters want the same stuff on the front page. We all want good posts about making good software. The hallmark of “high conflict” or over-polarized groups is that they’re willing to hurt their own goals in order to deliver (what is perceived as) a worse outcome for their opponent. (i.e. “if I can’t have it then no one can.”) We’re not there, thankfully. Even people with this thread with extreme anti-LLM views are not trying to intentionally hurt the community.
I completely agree with your analysis and I think it's missing from a lot of other posts.
As a community we can't do anything about the negative connotations that people have about AI use, but we can make it so that the tagging system does not reflect any judgment about the content itself.
However, I think "llm-usage" would be a good replacement tag, rather than "ai-usage". "AI" itself is a term that leans towards one-side of the issue, and I think it would be a mistake to accept the term "AI" instead of a more neutral (and more accurate!) one.
Why does "vibecoding" have a negative connotation?
Because the original definition suggested it was dashing off something that might or might not work without paying attention to the details or even looking at the code.
And because a sizable portion of the people on this forum assign negative connotations to the term. Many of them are doing so in this thread.
On every post I've tagged vibecoding, that effect has been intentional. The current state of LLM-boosterism is insane and I want it nowhere near this forum.
Exactly this should be flagging a post though. If you do not believe the post should be on this forum it should be flagged for removal. Tags on the other hand should provide extra detail about the contents of the post, so that search/filtering is possible. (I write this agreeing with you that I would prefer not to see AI related posts on this forum at all.)
Then we should be able to flag posts as vibecoding. At the moment, it is not clear that slop 'counts' as 'spam' or 'off-topic', even if many of us think it should; 'already posted' and 'broken link' are obviously not flag reasons that would apply.
If you feel it's not on-topic for this forum and it's not explicitly spam (automated content, advertising, etc.) then "off-topic" seems to cover it just fine.
Sorry but, your feelings about LLM doesn't make everything adjacent to them into vibecoding.
Using AI/LLM, coding tools. Don't also tag with
ai.
I've been following this to a tee. It just happens to also match my definition of what I want to insult.
I agree. I think the tag is basically useless for people who want to use the site primarily for what the site says it's about:
Lobsters is more of a garden party than a debate club. We're learning things we didn't know to be curious about and sharing what we've made.
I read posts here because I'm curious to learn more about computing, especially compilers and programming languages.
Daniel Lemire is someone I've learned a ton from, especially his work on SIMDjson and related performance optimization projects. He has started using AI in his optimization work, but has not stopped writing thoughtful pieces about computing. Another example is Mitchell Hashimoto and his posts about Ghostty internals. If I filter the "vibecoding" tag, then I will miss out on learning anything about computing that people like them post, so filtering that tag would defeat the stated purpose of Lobsters for me: curiosity about computing.
Conversely, I'm not curious about "AI takes" - whether they are boosting, lamenting, predicting future impact, or anything else. There are a million websites where you can get AI takes, and I come here for computing. I understand that people want to post and upvote AI takes here, but I would greatly appreciate a tag that let me filter those out without losing high-quality computing content from people like Daniel Lemire and Mitchell Hashimoto.
It’s actively made this site a worse community to participate in.
It feels like small vocal contingent gets to moderate content here in a world that is increasingly moving towards more LLM driven software.
How is the tag “moderating” anything? If you don’t filter the tag it changes nothing with regards to visibility. There’s not even a hotness mod regulating how it’s weighted on the frontpage.
How is the tag “moderating” anything?
By way of the chilling effect, as evidenced by the event preceding this very thread (a prominent, high-value, very much un-slop free software contributor deciding to self-exclude from the community because he had been made to feel unwelcome).
Lobste.rs isn't "the town square". You need to know someone to even get an invite in most cases.
I don't bother submitting content about proprietary software here, even if it's on-topic, because I know the community isn't very interested in it.
Lobste.rs isn't "the town square". You need to know someone to even get an invite in most cases.
How is that relevant?
I don't bother submitting content about proprietary software here, even if it's on-topic, because I know the community isn't very interested in it?
I'm not talking about topicality or community interest. (But even then, if a post about the choice of NIST curve seeds isn't topical or doesn't interest the community, then I don't know what is.) I'm talking about the chilling effect that the abuse of vibecoding tag creates on community members, not individual submissions.
I'm talking about the chilling effect that the abuse of vibecoding tag creates on community members, not individual submissions.
The post in question about the choice of ECDSA curve seeds was also very much promoting Anthropic. I don't think it was an abuse of the vibecoding tag. I'm sad that the author of the post was so unhappy about that, that they chose to leave. But that's a different question; I don't think it should be controversial to say a post promoting Anthropic's work is also about vibecoding.
I don't think it should be controversial to say a post promoting Anthropic's work is also about vibecoding.
I also don't think it should be controversial: it isn't. Alas, here we are.
The post in question about the choice of ECDSA curve seeds was also very much promoting Anthropic. I don't think it was an abuse of the vibecoding tag
Just to make my position clear, this sort of assigning-guilt-by-association use of the vibecoding tag to scarlet-letter any submission that is tangentially related to something that is related to LLMs is exactly the abuse of the tag that I believe is harmful to Lobste.rs.
this sort of assigning-guilt-by-association use of the vibecoding tag to scarlet-letter any submission that is tangentially related to something that is related to LLMs
I'll agree that we disagree on that...
The post was praising the work of one of the two largest corporate purveyors of vibecoding in the world. It's not "assigning guilt by association" to say that it's about LLM usage; it's a straightforward description of what the post was about. Employees of an LLM company used LLMs to find the seeds and claim the bounty, then donated it to LetsEncrypt. That is about LLM usage no matter which direction I squint at it from. That is not a tangential relation; it's the core of the post.
There have been cases where I've thought the tag was very much misapplied, but this is not one of them.
OK, I won't protract the argument beyond this message. But, indeed, we disagree.
Valsorda's post is discussing the global meaning and consequences of a general result in software engineering that happens to be attained, among other things, by use of LLM assistance, written by a person entirely unrelated to the use of said LLM assistance. Saying that the post itself is thus "about LLM usage" is literally guilt by association.
If you posit that the vibecoding tag is ought to be used in the transitively-tainting, fruit-of-poisoned-tree meaning, then that is exactly what I disagree with.
I'll stop too. I'd agree with your comment that
Valsorda's post is discussing the global meaning and consequences of a general result in software engineering that happens to be attained, among other things, by use of LLM assistance
if Valsorda wasn't glazing the LLM company, to the point of calling the authors "the Anthropic team" and saying he planned to send them t-shirts. That's not a happenstance mention. It's 5 mentions in a brief (thousand-ish word?) post.
Discussing the significance of the work doesn't require repeatedly praising its sponsor instead of the researchers, and for me that's the difference that tips the post toward being about LLM usage. A post about the result wouldn't emphasize the sponsor like this.
I don't see how referring to a team of people who work at a place by their employer is glazing. If this work had been done by a team of researchers from Sun Microsystems 30 years ago, we would have an article referring to them as the "Sun Microsystems team." As for the t-shirt bit, the community set up this challenge to find the seeds, so t-shirts aren't out of the question there either.
Recently a story about the impending end of the Deno open-source project was removed as off-topic from this site because the reason for the end of the project is the team being acquired by a company and assigned to work on other projects at their new employer, and thus it was "business news".
If that's enough to get a story removed as off-topic, then I don't see how "an LLM vendor did a thing" shouldn't at least be filterable.
I think that should be controversial. I think expanding the definition of vibe coding even further to incorporate any post that could be perceived to put any generative AI company in a good light is bad and we shouldn't do that.
At that point we're not even pretending that the tag has a use other than "I don't like AI". Which, to be fair, is about right for how it's used today.
I think expanding the definition of vibe coding even further to incorporate any post that could be perceived to put any generative AI company in a good light is bad and we shouldn't do that.
You're misunderstanding my comment. I am saying that any post with substantial discussion of a generative AI company's output, whether that puts them in a good light, a neutral light, or a bad light, is about their work. Which fits the general use of the vibecoding tag here, especially if you consider that people are using it as a content warning much of the time.
It's relevant because the "chilling effect" you cite is about how people are preventing from exercising their free speech rights because they might lose employment, be imprisoned etc. None of that applies to this self-selecting, invite-only link-sharing cite. Fake internet points aren't real.
Besides, very few posts tagged vibecoding are actually removed outright. GenAI proponents are free to submit whatever topical content they like, but they're not entitled to special treatment to protect their feelings here.
As for users leaving, this happens all the time: https://lobste.rs/moderations?moderator=%28All%29&what%5Busers%5D=users.
In regards to Valsorda, I have already speculated his departure could be due to other factors on this site.
It's relevant because the "chilling effect" you cite is about how people are preventing from exercising their free speech rights because they might lose employment, be imprisoned etc. None of that applies to this self-selecting, invite-only link-sharing cite. Fake internet points aren't real.
I expected this line of retort, but no, you are wrong.
The fact that the "chilling effect" was originally described in application to sovereign nation law does not matter one bit with respect to the fact that the same effect may also happen under different circumstances, in a different kind of society or community, on a different scale.
Lobste.rs does not need to have a law backed by violence for its community to be susceptible to the chilling effect on discourse.
GenAI proponents are free to submit whatever topical content they like, but they're not entitled to special treatment to protect their feelings here.
This sort of reductionist attitude ("well, it's just how it is, nobody owes you anything, deal with it") is neither valid nor helpful. Clearly, on Lobste.rs, some feelings are entitled to protection, and some matters deserve special treatment, otherwise our "rules" page would have been empty.
As a community, Lobste.rs can self-regulate and can also be externally regulated by moderators to foster a better community or steer the discourse in a certain way. Disallowing or curbing the abuse of specific ways of expression (like inflammatory, ill-defined tags) to avoid splintering the community and draining it of valuable contributions/participants feels like a valid topic on which the community should (self-)regulate.
You need to know someone to even get an invite in most cases.
That doesn't align with my experience. Getting an invitation here is as easy as going to the orange website and asking for one. Assuming your profile is somewhat okay, you'll get one right away.
This is maybe a problem and maybe we should be pruning the invite tree more aggressively for people who invite strangers.
This is maybe a problem and maybe we should be pruning the invite tree more aggressively for people who invite strangers.
Who's we exactly?
Interesting! I'd certainly agree that "need to know someone" is an overstatement (I personally invite people on the basis of an interesting IRC conversation or two, or because they authored a post that we're discussing here and they express a desire to participate, without knowing any more than that). But I've never been asked for or invited someone on HN. I didn't know that was a regular thing.
OK good to know, I haven't given out invites in a couple of years. IRC used to be the usual channel then.
Agree, I also don't share my open projects anymore, because of the hate and backlash I received for using LLM to assist
Because people use tags to decide which link to click on, and it often misrepresents the content of the link
The way many people seem to use the vibecoding tag is different from all the other tags. Where the others indicate a topic covered in whatever's been posted, vibecoding is being used as something more like a "content warning" (or "trigger warning") would be used elsewhere. Which is to say, it's getting added if a post touches on LLM usage even when that's not the main topic.
I think it's fine and valuable to have tags like that (and it might even be a good idea to declare a separate category for those, like the media tags), but it should be documented.
This feels to me like a "cattle path" situation where we should create support for the way people are actually using it, and maybe also add a new tag for things that are specifically about LLM usage.
is being used as something more like a "content warning"
And it's not a new concept either, we had (and still have) https://lobste.rs/t/merkle-trees for the same reason. Remember when lobste.rs cryptocurrency slop was endless? I was there, Gandalf. I was there three thousand years ago.
And I was fine with treating it kind of like that... until I started noticing people producing good original content turning away because of this classification. The linked example is the most public and high profile one. I'm not sure that's a good direction for people who want non-llm content. Throwing around generic negative labels has real negative effects.
I suspect that if it were explained as a content warning, it wouldn't have the same effect. One example I've noticed personally: a friend of a friend on fedi started posting occasional posts describing interesting things he'd done using a coding agent. When asked kindly whether he'd be willing to slap a content warning on those, he cheerfully started doing that. (I think he even used "vibecoding" as his CW.)
It seems like a little up-front explanation could go a long way here.
As someone who would like all LLM use to be denigrated and shunned, I have to agree. There's a valid differentiation to be made, even if I wish it didn't exist.
My fear of splitting the tag into
Is that we just move the "Any LLM use is worth discussing because it's unethical and silence is compliance" vs "LLM use is normal and fine, it should not be tagged, how dare you luddites imply this isn't normal I tell me I have to disclose LLM use" arguments to the new tag. I think we should be having those arguments, but not sure the split moves the needle on anything.
I don't see what all the fuss is about, but that's mostly because I got driven away from hackernews to try to find somewhere that I found more reasonable towards LLM's, so that's my own personal sense of reasonableness. It it does feel like vying to keep the vibecoding tag as it is would be to support continuing a culture war just because I think I might win it. Would be personally happy for Lobsters to explicitly be that anti-AI space, but I don't think that's the intent.
Yeah, I agree splitting the tag makes sense, but also agreed it's not going to make a contentious topic any less contentious.
Agreed. The tag is too subjective and polarizing. Half the site sees it as a useful tool and the other half sees it as toxic/slop/etc... So it says more about the user than about the post.
Half the site sees it as a useful tool
The purpose of tags on Lobster.s is to be able to filter out content you are not interested.
From https://lobste.rs/about#tagging
Explain the scope, list existing stories that should have been tagged, make a case for why people would want to specifically filter it out, and justify the increased complexity for submitters and mods.
Last time I checked, half the site is not using the vibecoding tag. (Can't find where to see the number of users filtering it a tag right now)
(Can't find where to see the number of users filtering it a tag right now)
When you submit a new story and assign tags. vibecoding has 727 filtering users, ai 398. I can't remember the exact amount of users (and the stats page is seemingly broken), but I recall it being two magnitudes greater.
My intention is more to highlight that there is a divide on this site. I don't know what the exact numbers are, but that would be interesting to see.
To add more, the tags should be as objective and descriptive as possible. Any tag that doesn't have a common definition is probably not that useful.
I don't think policing how a tag gets used will solve the more fundamental problem. We have a sizeable community of people here that hate LLMs and generative AI, but also won't stop talking about it. That toxicity inevitably leeches into everything else on the website.
We have a sizeable community of people here that hate LLMs and generative AI, but also won't stop talking about it. That toxicity inevitably leeches into everything else on the website.
I can make the exact same argument from the opposite direction.
The fundamental problem is that the topic of LLMs has become so polarized. It's not a matter of the "ani-LLM" people being too toxic. It's that people on both sides of the discussion are seemingly unable to sit down and have calm, rational conversations about it.
I’m aware that it’s easy to have a distorted perception of the debate when you have an opinion on it, but I would eat my shoe if Lobsters didn’t have many times more dismissive comments from people who strongly dislike LLMs than by proponents.[0] Which is not to say that there aren’t some annoying boosters—today I flagged someone for a low effort trollish “it’s the future, get over it” type post.
[0] I’m less LLM-pilled than a lot of people I read. I think the stated 10x productivity improvements are generally based on tunnel vision for projects that are unusually LLM friendly (and/or focusing on how much code you can write, not how much you can actually do for a user/customer). However, I do primarily use LLMs to code, and don’t expect that to change. I do also think that producing quality output with LLMs is challenging, in a way that leads a lot of people to produce bad work.
I suspect part of the belief that there are more dismissive comments from anti-LLM people may come from the fact that some dismissive comments from pro-LLM people can superficially sound a little bit more "polite" in many cases (or at least, not come across immediately as downright rude). It's easy to say things like "the genie isn't going back in the bottle" or "AI is inevitable" which when used in these kinds of discussions I would say can almost come across just as badly to the anti-LLM crowd as outright calling them luddites. I think the pro-LLM crowd doesn't see it that way and might even brush it aside as an overreaction because, as you say, it's easy to have a distorted perception of a debate when you have an opinion (and even worse, a strong opinion).
As well, I suspect that people on the pro-LLM side may (huge emphasis on the word "may") have a sense that they're "obviously doing the right thing" (because they strongly believe that this is the way the future is going and there's no stopping it) and have somewhat of a sense of superiority about it (perhaps only subconsciously) as I've anecdotally noticed that is a common feeling I've gotten from reading pro-LLM user comments. This kind of thing will probably also be interpreted dismissively by the anti-LLM side I think (because, well, it kind of is?), but it's perhaps a bit more subtle if you're on the pro-LLM side.
My original comment here on Lobsters that you replied to was actually made after I first became aware of this thread here on Lobsters from reading some particularly toxic posts from anti-LLM people on the Fediverse. So, I definitely agree with you that anti-LLM people can be extremely terrible here and I'm not excusing this at all.
I will also acknowledge that as a generally anti-LLM person myself I very recently even had a somewhat "explosive" reaction at my work to someone who was throwing around LLM copy&pasted output that was objectively "slop." Not one of my better moments for sure, regardless of the fact that I was right that what this person was doing was wrong. And in this situation, I've no doubt that the person in question only came away with "Gered is a jerk" not "oops, I missed up, Gered was right, I'll make sure I don't make that mistake next time." I reflected on this a lot after it happened and one of my takeaways was that I suspected I got so riled up at this person because he was making the exact types of almost-polite-sounding dismissive comments that I mentioned above to me a few weeks beforehand. I think this is something that the pro-LLM crowd needs to spend a lot more time thinking about, honestly.
Very long winded way of saying that I think both sides can be equally as guilty of toxicity as the other and I don't think I've seen enough credible evidence one way or the other that either side is worse than the other.
Just all my $0.02!
But this is what tagging is partially supposed to address right? Don't like LLMs? Filter out the vibecoding tag and move on. Why are people who don't like LLMs going onto articles about them and derailing discussions? I don't care about ruby, but you don't see me going into articles about ruby suggesting people use rust instead.
I don't care about ruby, but you don't see me going into articles about ruby suggesting people use rust instead.
That kind of programming language rant would be removed by the mods. LLMs are the only topic where derailing and personal attacks get a pass.
We have a sizeable community of people here that hate LLMs and generative AI, but also won't stop talking about it.
I think you're drawing conclusions that are not backed by facts and I don't think you're ill-intentioned at all.
There are people who hate LLMs. There are people who won't stop talking about it. Estimating the intersection of these groups is difficult however. These groups also don't equate people who "suggest" tags. I wish we had more insight into that.
What bothers me in this situation is that very real humans feel bad due to tags being suggested by other very real humans (and then applied). I feel that there is a small group of people who are responsible suggesting tags when there is any sign of association with LLMs. To me, it looks these people are effectively harassing others and that's maybe how things should be dealt with.
I want to know who suggest tags; there's the moderation log and I want the tag suggestions log now.
I want to know who suggest tags; there's the moderation log and I want the tag suggestions log now.
What on earth for? Aside from a few exceptions that lower a submission's standing on the front page, tags are neutral.
You might be conjecturing that the tag's presence tells some people that they should not upvote it. But lobste.rs isn't supposed to be marketing channel.
They're not neutral, their primary purpose is filtering stories.
You are correct, I should have specified that only applies if you don't filter.
However, consider that some tag suggestions are from people actively filtering on "vibecoding" who consider the current tags incorrect.
Please explain what you mean. My understanding is the vast majority of suggests of the vibecoding tag are by people who have it filtered out, and do not want to talk about LLMs. Do you have any evidence or examples to the contrary?
I think this has absolutely destroyed this article's discussion, as the people most likely to want to keep this tag as is have the article filtered out.
What can you do? The original article only had the meta tag. Someone suggested a tag that would guarantee that others like them won't be able to contribute positively to the discussion.
I've seen a real uptick of LLM proponents trying to reframe what is toxic about this situation. Will it work? Good luck to you.
That's a peculiar thing to say considering most of the people who find the current situation highly toxic are LLM critics.
Look, if you want to boost AI and talk about how great Anthropic is, the orange site is right there waiting for you with open arms.
Any mention of AI is equivalent to boosting?
You can't just "mention AI". If you are mentioning it, you are necessarily saying something about it. And if the thing you are saying is entirely uncritical, then you are boosting, intentionally or not.
I don’t think that’s what most people would consider “boosting”
I think of "boosting" as increasing the overall visibility of a topic, sort of related to the old "retweet is not an endorsement" vis-a-vis "I don’t care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.” I think many people just want less focus on generative AI tooling, because to them it seems to have consumed all of the oxygen in the room. Filtering out "vibecoding" filters both sides, which may be their preference.
Let’s say hypothetically that the best frontier AI models become open source to offset the costs to content creators on whose data those models were trained in the past, and that governments introduced jobs programs, UBI, and dedicated reparations to, or investments in, developing countries (its related to the discourse).
Would the stance of an anti-AI or anti-LLM critic change, then? If so, then their problem is not the technology, it’s the societal impact. The societal impacts are related to governance problems, and not technical issues related to AI or LLMs. As before the answer to these ills from a technological perspective is open source.
As someone with the vibecoding tag filtered out - it feels like we've reinvented a downvote system, except in our system it only takes 2 downvotes to kill a post.
The tag suggestion feature works fine for "uncontroversial" tags, but it really doesn't seem to work here. I don't really know what the proper solution would be - maybe suggestions should continue to be allowed even after the tags are changed?
Maybe the tagging system could be expanded to allow voting for each tag - upvoting the vibecoding tag on a story that already has it to prevent it from being removed, and downvoting it on a story that doesn't have it to say it's halal and shouldn't receive it. But that all also sounds very complicated. I don't know.
Why would a vibecoding tag kill a post? Does really everyone filter it out? If that's the case, I guess we can just make it offtopic and be done with it. (I don't think it's the case though).
It's only the second-most filtered tag (far behind meta...)
It seems to be rising (last time I looked at it, I think it was in the 400s) but actually what might be interesting to know is if it is rising faster than meta (if someone wants to write the SQL query for pushcx...) :)
This is still far below the majority of users (another thread under this posr went more into details about those numbers) so there is still plenty of audience.
Look at HN: the front page is now 90% AI press releases, discussions about AI, LLM-produced code, or LLM-generated prose. That’s not the content I come to tech aggregators to read. It's incredibly frustrating and demoralizing to get halfway through an article and suddenly realize it's another LLM piece. I like that Lobsters gives me a way to filter this out, and I don’t really understand why someone would find such a tag offensive.
I agree the current tag may be too broad. The linked article is about an interesting discovery that stands on its own regardless of LLM use (which is not the author’s doing anyway). Maybe we need more specific tags. But removing it would just turn the site into another HN over time.
(However, I also feel like there’s a sense of entitlement from LLM users demanding their content be treated equally to human-made content. This I vehemently disagree with.)
I just don’t understand why someone would find a tag so offensive.
If I had invested some time into writing a blog post about a topic I cared about, and someone came along and slapped a "vibe", "low effort" or a "that's so slop" label on it, I would also be kinda pissed off?
I can also see the other aspect of this, if I'd been working on the; where did these seeds come from problem, only to have a extremely well funded lab come in and solve the mystery (with minimal effort?), I to would be disappointed by the original blog post.
I disagree. I filter it out. I’m not interested in slop.
That's precisely the problem. I, too, want to filter out slop. Filtering out the vibecoding tag should be a good way of doing that. Yet if one does that, one also filters out stories that are about technical developments in deep learning that happen to be close enough to LLMs to get swallowed into the tag, or even stories about how slop is harmful, or e.g. stories about how an open source project is actively rejecting slop.
You might also want to filter out those kinds of stories, but I think we can agree that they are distinct from slop (and from eachother).
The tag is terrible.
For me, it's not just the slop, it's as another comment I read recently said: It sucks all the air out of the room. I just want to read about smart people putting blood sweat and tears into hard computery problems, and AI just kills the vibe and starts too many off-topic arguments. The ability to filter out the vibecoding tag makes this site one of the few places on the Internet where I can get a non-tech-bro-flooded experience anymore.
As someone taking the exact opposite approach, I sympathize a lot. On the one hand there's a lot of interesting and valid stuff out there that use LLM's as part of the process, and I only see that becoming more common and useful in indirect ways beyond "whip up a shitty application out of nothing": brainstorming, generating boilerplate, picking apart obscure binary formats, etc. On the other hand, if a human can't be bothered to write about it, I don't want to bother reading about it, and the best tool I have for enforcing that norm is to take my eyes elsewhere. On the gripping hand... basically exactly what /u/yokljo said in the sibling comment, it's so fucking toxic to be around at all and the gradiations are all so hidden that it starts giant fucking arguments about valid applications, responsible disclosure, "omg someone used an em-dash" cargo-culting and so on every time it comes up.
To me the only way to meaningfully avoid it is to over-fit and accept I'll miss some cool stuff.
So is everything that involves AI usage “slop”?
Yes.
So first we redefined "vibecoding" from using AI tools to generate code without review to anything that touches on LLMs at all, and now we're redefining "slop" from low quality AI content to... anything that touches on LLMs (or generative AI) at all?
I like it when words are useful.
"slop" was always the term for soulless things, like in "corposlop"; it pre-dates GenAI.
I tried to find uses of "slop" for soulless content that predate GenAI but didn't find them. Do you have any hints? Wikipedia suggests it was coined for AI-generated images.
Wiktionary might be a better source for such things.
Basically, "slop" comes from the word "slyppe", which is old English for a sticky substance/paste.
Slop itself, predating generative AI, is typically more used to refer to food; basically if you've ever eaten anything that makes you not want to know the ingredients because of how bland it looked and tasted, that's slop. Gruel, some stews or certain soups; these are the sorts of food that tend to easily get the moniker "slop". It's generally not unhealthy for you, but won't exactly do anything to improve your health either. If you've ever been at a getaway camp as a youth, you'll probably have some idea as to what slop is and tastes like. (Or if you're past a certain age in certain parts of the world, slop is just what you had to eat to survive because you had no other choice. Prison food also gets the moniker, although I have no direct experience besides seeing it described as such in books.)
The jump from that to things in general turns it into "content or entertainment which is worthless, or produced and consumed mindlessly" (direct citation), which predates genAI usage, but also maps very well onto the main sentiment that AI Boosters tend to create.
"Corposlop" is a post-genAI term and is more a combination of the derogatory term "corpo" (lifted straight from the Cyberpunk TTRPG, boosted in popularity due to the game Cyberpunk 2077 bringing it into the general consciousness) with the word slop. It's the kind of writing that's not really meant to actually be read by a human, but something a corporation produces; laden with fake excitement, strange misdirection and so light on actual information that the entire thing could've been abbreviated to a 3 sentence email.
Wikipedia suggests it was coined for AI-generated images.
The term "AI slop" was coined for slop generated by "AI", shocking.
In the 19th century, "slop" had a negative connotation. There was an economic conflict between the slop traders and the older bespoke tailoring industry.
Sound familiar?
The tag description is "Using AI/LLM, coding tools. Don't also tag with ai.". That's the definition of "vibe-coding" this site uses, so that's the criteria used to tag submissions.
I'd be happy to have a third, fourth or fifth tag to describe every "degree" on which LLMs are used to keep you all happy, as long as I can keep filtering it out of my view.
Both the slash and the comma are confusing. Does that definition mean...
ai tag isn't intended to be used about applications of AI)It's no wonder there's ongoing debate here about what the tag even means.
That even Justice Scalia would interpret the Twenty-sixth Amendment (and the Seventeenth and Seventh Amendments, for that matter) to mean precisely what we all know it to mean, despite what it actually says, goes a long way in demonstrating that even "plain" meaning isn't always as plain as it seems and that language—even language expressed as clearly as is possible—divorced from context rarely, if ever, has a meaning that is truly plain.
— Commas, Constitutional Grammar, and the Straight-Face Test: What If Conan the Grammarian Were a Strict Textualist? (1999)
Anything made with generative AI is by definition "slop". There is no spectrum.
By that definition, a majority of long-running, high-quality, oft-used software projects contain at the very least some slop now. Doesn’t seem a 100% accurate definition, maybe more based on moral grounds than output quality? (which, to be absolutely clear, is fine by me! That’s why tags exist – to filter certain topics out)
Edit; I think there is infact a massive spectrum if you’re talking about generative AI, and not LLMs specifically: Slop images are unfortunately a dime a dozen, whereas for example code output can be decent, as people like, I don’t know, Linus Torvalds would affirm.
Even stories about e.g. an open source project adopting policies to explicitly reject AI contributions? Because those currently get swallowed by the tag the way things currently work.
I fail to see how you could come to this conclusion. But no, it's not.
But no, it's not
And yet, every post about rejecting AI contributions, discussing downsides of AI-assisted coding, or even just straight up shit talking AI assisted coding, are tagged with "vibecoding". The tag is stupid.
What is "it" in this sense?
I filter out vibecoding too, and I like its usage as a "content warning" of sorts even for fairly tangential mentions of LLMs, but the post in question definitely isn't slop, nor did it deserve the vibecoding tag.
The only relation to AI that post has is that it discusses a fact that happened to be discovered by LLMs. Is that fact now forbidden knowledge? Is any discussion of it doomed to be "vibecoding"?
If Anthropic proves that P=NP, will any mention of P=NP on the site warrant a vibecoding tag?
Have any of the people complaining that the NIST elliptic curve submission was mis-tagged bothered to message a mod about it?
No, because I assume the mods have a life.
I think it's bad that adding the tag just requires 2 people, but removing it requires bothering a mod about it.
It’s exactly this kind of stance that makes the tag useless. You’ll just flag anything.
No, and thanks for the question. I consider LLM and other generative AI output slop, not necessarily other kinds of AI output. The term had a meaning before.
Do you want to filter out an article which links to an example project which just happened to have Claude in authors, even though the article content had nothing to do with AI? Because this has been the case here already. (I can't remember the specific link - maybe someone recalls. I think the link was in the footnotes.)
Even the NIST post linked isn't talking about LLMs - it's just a fact of how the values were found, but that's not really relevant to the content itself. (I.e. information about the challenge, history, cryptography, etc. - if a person found the seeds, only the attribution part would change)
Even anti-ai posts are tagged https://lobste.rs/s/1kesjm/abolish_ai_manifesto (let's ignore the quality of that one for the moment...)
But we still could have llm-written, llm-development and llm-vaguely-adjacent-3rd-degree-relation (or better named) tags.
Just to be clear - I would love for you to be able to filter out LLM generated or LLM-related content you don't want to see, regardless if we have the same view on them. But right now it's a lose-lose for both of us.
Do you want to filter out an article which links to an example project which just happened to have Claude in authors
Yes.
Do you want to filter out an article which links to an example project which just happened to have Claude in authors, even though the article content had nothing to do with AI?
Yes.
Serious question: Why doesn't the same logic apply to lobste.rs itself which is: based on Rails (accepted LLM code), links out to DNSimple (provides/advertises agent CLI), links out to and deploys via Hatchbox (provides/advertises MCP), has a shoutout to Shopify engineers (LLM heavy company). If a single tangential link like that disqualifies a post, why don't many of them disqualify lobsters as a service?
(I did a quick skim of the about page - I'm sure there's more)
It's a question for every person individually, and I'm not the person you're replying to, I think it's a matter of effort. As a rails dev who used Hatchbox and DNSimple in the past, I'm extremely sad and frustrated that these advertise LLM anything. But switching away from them is an immense cost of time and effort. Conversely, not linking to a new article or project that contains any trace of LLM content is trivial effort.
It's the difference to me of using tech that gained LLM features after they were in use vs chose to adopt new tools that promoted LLMs.
Conversely, not linking to a new article or project that contains any trace of LLM content is trivial effort.
So you condider off limits articles about the Linux kernel, the major browsers, some major desktop envs, many compiler toolchains, etc ?
I think your saying my heuristic over-excludes many things I might consider valuable, and you're right. No rule is perfect in every situation, but I'm okay with that tradeoff here.
Your examples in particular are all things I don't feel any need to read about, in part because they accept (and often encourage) LLM contributions.
Keeping in mind that the platform itself and links to articles are different (and I’m not sure if that makes any difference), for me these are relevant questions:
I don’t have an answer to the callouts. For deployment and SAAS, I would appreciate interest in moving to other services.
Does the lobste.rs project accept genAI contributions?
It is very clearly stated that this is not accepted: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/pull/1652/changes
Whenever these discussions come up I browse through /t/vibecoding and quickly conclude that overall the tag is still working great! I might occasionally miss out on some discussions that could have been vaguely interesting (just as with the other tags I filter) and one day something I submit will be tagged in a way that I disagree with but I can live with that if it keeps the site enjoyable a little longer.
I'm not sure the post in question merely mentioned LLMs in passing:
Speaking of swag, I am 100% making stickers with the srand48() seeds, and t-shirts for the Anthropic team
Anthropic, like Google, is in the business of marketing first, and only tech secondarily. The sheer fact that the NIST seeds are being talked about is part of, what could well be, a slop narrative. Namely that Anthropic is "pioneering" AI.
It would not at all surprise me if this whole thing comes from a prompt, like some manager at Anthropic just typed: "think of cool things that we can do with our in-house models that keep us in the news cycle. then do the ones that seem most possible. only report back on ones that are successful".
To what larger narrative does the NIST seeds story belong? For example, when I read the TEE attacks survey story currently on the frontpage I have the sense that it's performing a public service to the secure community as whole. But the only thing I take from the NIST seeds story is an implicitly threatening reminder that Anthropic has enormous unchecked powers. It's like the mafia calling into their local coffee shop, casually mentioning how delicious the coffee is, and how it'd be shame if anything bad were to happen to the building.
The vibecoding tag was deserved.
That quote is at the end of the article, and mentions giving out physical swag to commemorate a meaningful event. It's the very definition of a mention in passing. The post discussed what the NIST curves are, why we might be curious about their seeds, the seeds that were found, and some related technical matters.
I don't think it's the "in passing" bit you disagree with. But rather the bit about Anthropic's agenda.
I can't believe that I need to spell out that the entire reason the mafia are talking about coffee, is for the cover of mentioning things in passing. If you pushed them about their meaning, they'd just throw up their hands and say, "Hey, hey, I'm just saying the coffee is nice. Don't be so paranoid."
<tone>calmly and kindly</tone> Honestly, at this point, a lobsters offshoot might not be the worst idea. We have LLM enjoyers who are weary of constant barbs, and LLM not-enjoyers who are saying, e.g. in this thread that "all LLM use [should] be denigrated and shunned". This isn't a level of disagreement that you can resolve with a good tag ontology. The only reason to persist is expecting that the site will eventually converge on one side or the other. Enough time has passed that I don't think that will happen soon. I don't care if I'm on lobsters-original or lobsters-alternate, I would just like some chill back.
I fear that quote creates an implication in my comment that wasn't there by taking it out of context. The quote was "As someone who would like all LLM use to be denigrated and shunned". I am someone who would like that to be the case, I cannot deny my feelings, but that is not the same as saying that it should be the case, and especially not the same as saying that it should be the case here on this website. The rest of the comment expands on this theme, and is in support of removing the vibecoding tag specifically because it seems like an unfair barb at people, even though those people are the people I disagree with.
Your point is taken, but I wonder how much we can keep splitting off into our own comfortable subgroups. Either we're going to hurt eachother, or we're going to only be around people we agree with.
The mods are asleep at the wheel on this topic and don't realize how toxic of a dynamic they've let fester.
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't want to see or read full-blown vibecoded posts here and walks away from dozens of ai-written articles a week. I regularly dig into projects that mange to bypass the vibecoding tag and when I pull back the curtains I see mountains of obviously claude-generated comments and then I come back to the front page and see a blog post that says "I asked claude to point me at what research I need to read on this topic" get tagged as vibecoding. Then I go into the comments and see a number of familiar faces talking about how touching ai with a 50-meter pole means that you're complacent with fascism. While they ignore the blatant ai-written slop blogpost on the front page. Okay.
It's not good. The situation is actually bad. People are using an insult-coded word for a tag for like four different purposes and disagree on what it means and whenever arguments about the moderation direction flare up about it or whether it's insulting or not, NOTHING ACTUALLY CHANGES. And this is a problem. If it wasn't a problem, the problem wouldn't keep getting brought up BY PEOPLE THAT DON'T LIKE AI.
I don't care what the resolution is. Just do something. Make it clear whether or not the site's moderation is okay with there being a clique of ultra-anti-ai people going around denigrating everything that tangentially touches on LLMs but ignoring obviously ai-written articles that don't disclose it or projects that are obviously heavily ai-assisted but don't have an agents.md. Because that's what's happening. If this is a feature and not a bug then I want to know so I can write the site off as having an ineffectual, toxic approach to keeping out ai spam and delete my bookmark. If it's a bug then I want you to fix it. Splitting the tag is fine. Changing the tag and adding an "llm spam" flag reason is fine. Just do SOMETHING. At this point the site is developing a "the neo-nazi at the bar keeps telling everyone not to turn the bar into a nazi bar" dynamic.
That's roughly how I feel. It isn't feasible to outsource the site's opinion on LLMs, whatever that may be, to the heckler's veto of suggested tags and repetitive comments. Even extreme rules like "you may not discuss articles that mention AI" or "you may not attack people for mentioning AI" would improve this community.
My tastes say that I should filter "vibecoding" out. But since it means so many things to so many people, decent posts end up being tagged with it. And so, I don't filter this tag out, and here I am--engaged in yet another community discussion about this tag that means nothing to everyone as a whole, but something to every individual.
In my opinion, there is no salvaging this tag. The tag is itself a pejorative for something that reasonable people have different appetites.
Archive it, split it, kill it--whatever that means--but there's clearly no consensus on what the tag means, or should mean, and continues causing unnecessary division in one of the internet's best communities. This isn't a complicated problem; nobody is invested in this tag. Its absence will be forgotten a lot faster than the acrimonious discussions that pop up around it.
The tag today has completely devolved into a generic "i don't like AI" trigger warning tag. It's placed on stories where LLMs are used in any form whatsoever. I have accepted it at this point, that this is what the community is using it for, but I have actual doubts that the majority of the community wants it that way.
For a start, if it was just a way to not enter conversations at all and filter it out, it might even work. Except almost every single post that involves that tag, also has a meta discussion in the comments about AI, instead of actually talking about the topic at hand.
I'm new to Lobste.rs, and I really liked the idea of community tagging and personal filtering. I just don't like seeing tagging used to enforce a stance. Some people want a set-and-forget filter for anything even remotely related to AI/LLMs, and I think that's a fair preference. The problem is that vibecoding has become overloaded, and the people benefiting from that broad filtering don't bear the cost of incorrectly tagging otherwise interesting technical content.
But maybe overtagging itself isn't the issue? What if we keep vibecoding for its actual meaning and introduce a neutral, deliberately broad tag like llm-related that can include even passing mentions? People who want to avoid all AI content can filter that instead, without attaching the stigma of vibecoding/slop to everything. Wouldn't that satisfy both sides without asking anyone to compromise on what they want to read?
Edit: I just noticed that even this meta post discussing the misuse of the vibecoding tag has itself been tagged vibecoding, in addition to meta. Which is just ridiculous to me, and kind of proves the point.
I just noticed that even this meta post discussing the misuse of the vibecoding tag has itself been tagged vibecoding, in addition to meta. Which is just ridiculous to me, and kind of proves the point.
Someone else, on another thread rehashing same points couple of weeks ago, has put it in a better words: the tag is used by people filtering it out to have a pre-2022 view of the site, like if the LLMs have never taken off.
There's nothing wrong with wanting that experience, but vibecoding is the wrong tag to provide it. A broad, neutral llm-related tag could explicitly serve that purpose without misrepresenting what the underlying content is. The distinction is between “I don't want to see this” and “this is vibecoding.” Those shouldn't have to mean the same thing.
As an AI booster, if a good chunk of the site isn't showing up in the comments because they don't like any post vaguely related to an LLM, I think that makes the comments less likely to contain a pointless LLM ethics discussion instead of the technical merits. I don't really see the problem with an overused opt-in filtering mechanism, and the NIST post was by no means a reach to be tagged vibecoding. There are reach posts like that, but, like, you can just ignore it. I don't read tags, I click titles if the title sounds interesting. If you filter out tags based on aesthetic attributes, your loss, and that doesn't mean tags shouldn't be based on aesthetic attributes if it's a major user preference.
The vibecoding tag has been getting more and more useless for a while now.
As a user of the vibecoding tag, i.e. I filter out stories tagged with it, I disagree. If anything is this posts like this one, that want to dilute its purpose that want to make it less useful.
The crux of the matter is that the user that left feels that the vibecoding tag is a "scarlet letter", a mark of shame. That is a value judgement on their work. I don't think they are wrong to feel that way as the term vibecoding is not neutral. Although he term as originally coined by an LLM user was meant to be positive in meaning, as LLMs users want to introduce nuances in how people use LLMs it has shifted in meaning to a more negative one. Even LLM users now use the term vibecoding with derision. As I mentioned before, I think the tag should be renamed to a more neutral name, LLM.
Whether it's an original, interesting article that turns out to be nth-degree related to llms and filtered out,
Seems to me that part of your frustration is that people are using the tag to filter out content that you'd with they engage with.
If you are referring to why Filippo Valsorda deactivated his account, this post states the reason:
I feel more and more like I don't belong in almost any tech community because I believe LLM agents are real, passkeys are good, and fascism is bad.
There's a definite and vocal anti-passkey faction here, and the community/mods have been accused of fostering fascism multiple times.
Maybe the tag addition was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
Although he term as originally coined by an LLM user was meant to be positive in meaning [...]
Not just any LLM user either, according to Wikipedia it was coined by Karpathy, presumably as a marketing term.
I personally think that it's a great word and the perfect name for the tag. Anything else we come up with will be more awkward and gain the same connotations anyway. But I am ok with any name as long as the filtering is at least as effective as the current tag.
I've been lurking for almost a decade, after leaving Reddit due to inane cultural dog-piling. Online communities (and especially aggregator communities) always degrade to warring over binary identifiers and loyalty tests; Maybe the medium is just not expressive enough to preserve real human connection. Maybe the medium is too good at convincing us our personal opinions are the popular and righteous ones...
In the time since I joined this site I've started my own business and integrated into my local community, made lots of friends, and spend maybe 5 minutes a day surfing aggregators. Probably because I just have the bookmark in my browser toolbar and click it out of habit.
I think the era of online communities is dead, reading through the comments on this post just affirm that. And it wasn't Gen AI that did it, it's these "communities" inability to build rewarding friendships that extend past 'X thing is Bad, and You are Bad for liking it'
I'm gonna delete my bookmark for this site, and deactivate my account. I hope I inspire others to as well. It's never been a better time to make friends in meat space that truly care about you, and understand you
I'm sorry you feel this way but I disagree with your assertion here. While many people here have the view, sometimes very strongly, that gen AI is bad - for society, for the environment, for individuals, for code quality, whatever - I'm really not seeing a lot of examples of "you are bad for liking it." It's a difficult line to walk but I think most discussion of an otherwise very fraught topic stays respectful.
Online communities aren't dead, and I don't want them to die. This is one of the remaining good ones. It's not perfect but I think the suggestions in this thread are entirely sensible and will help.
I have absolutely seen the "you are bad for liking it" people get massive social traction here and I think it's very tone-deaf that you're asserting that they aren't here, under someone who's describing a negative experience with them, when they definitely are here. It might be what you honestly believe but without that perspective it just looks like blatant disregard for what's actually happening.
I can't really provide evidence of a negative, but if you disagree, you certainly could provide some examples.
It feels like we are seeing the effects of the paradox of tolerance. The anti-LLM extremists have pushed out the pro-LLM extremists, and they are now pushing out everyone else.
I think there is a range to LLM-usage in writing code. People can use it as a personalized Stack Overflow, to handle repetitive refactors, to build an initial draft, to pressure-test, to review, or to carelessly build an entire app from a few sentences—or even ignore it altogether! I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with any of these takes; different situations call for different approaches, and I myself fall into all of these camps.
It’s been mentioned a few times here, but vibecoding can be a derogatory term; it signals that the LLM did the thinking and the building. It feels like anti-LLM extremists are empowered by the “vibecoding” tag to bully anyone who uses or references LLMs on any level.
Lobsters is described as a garden party. The presence of the vibecoding tag indicates that careless LLM-usage is welcome content here; the language of the vibecoding tag indicates that LLM-usage is unwelcome content here. I don’t think anyone wins, and everybody goes home from the party at night thinking about an unpleasant interaction they had.
I am really tired of the endless vibecoding discussions here. I am here for interesting content and discussions. If I know it's slop [bad quality] I don't want to read it. If it's AI slop I might be even less inclined to do so [clearly no effort at all]. Lobsters is now the biggest AI reminder I know because everywhere is a vibecoding comment thread & tag, while filtering it out will not bring you the results you might have intended.
I don't care what people use to create their content when it is good enough that I want to read it.
In ten years we will know whether all of this was a good idea or not, until then I'd love to focus on the actually interesting stuff instead of re-hashing the same dreadful conversations a thousand times.
I think my general issue with the tag is that it acts as a magnet for terrible commentary, and brings the level of discourse down across the board. People keep rehashing the same arguments, both for and against AI, and ultimately contribute nothing to the topic at hand. There is a non-trivial contingent of users who have decided that anything even tangentially related to AI is unworthy of discussion here - it's not about the content quality for them, it's purely about waging a war against AI/AI usage, and punishing those they disagree with.
I'm completely on board with throwing out low-effort, soulless, look-at-what-I-just-generated garbage - but there is high-value, interesting conversation to be had about things that are related to AI, or involve some degree of AI assistance, and it is nonsense to label them as the same thing. If the majority of the community here is more interested in disregarding anything even tangentially related to AI, regardless of quality, then it is what it is - we all have the choice of going elsewhere - but I do believe the community loses out with that attitude.
Do you think a more neutral or positively worded tag would act less like "a magnet for terrible commentary"?
Perhaps - I think more precise labels would be helpful in some respects. The vibecoding tag has its place for content that really meets the definition, i.e. stuff that is largely or completely AI-generated with little human review or alteration. Work that is AI-assisted isn't the same thing to me, but likely still deserves an "ai-assisted" tag for those that don't want to see content that involves any AI at all. I also think AI as a topic deserves its own tag, to distinguish meta discussion about AI from AI-derived work.
Ultimately though, it depends on the attitude and culture of the community at large - if those tags attract the same type of low-quality commentary, then it didn't matter that we made the tags more precise, the problem persists. That maybe means it's more a moderation issue - but I don't want to burden the mods overly much either. The community itself has to self-police a bit to encourage good contributions, and discourage poor behavior
"vibecoding" has been misapplied on that particular entry (NIST curves). But the tag is useful to me, because as a normal LLM user I really want to avoid these lobsters' comment threads.
I don't mind the articles, I often skim them. But the comment threads are the problem - they seem to downgrade everyone involved. Everyone and their dog repeat the same trite conversations, an infinite source of opinionated/enlightened/visionary stances that are utterly boring and repetitive.
I use LLMs, not an enemy, and it's quite obvious that none of these comments are of any practical value anymore. They live in half-2025 forever.
That's why I say the tag was misapplied, because there all the comments were actually about cryptography.
I use LLMs, not an enemy
Evidently, if you use LLMs, to those people you are the enemy.
I can see how my post could be interpreted in that way, but I want to clarify that that is not what I mean.
GenAI/LLM users are not an enemy, but the technology is, just like how I don't think users of proprietary software, people who eat meat or people who drive a big car are an enemy. All of these things are harmful and unethical, but life is more complicated than that, and we all need to make our own trade-offs that fit our own lives and conditions.
This does not mean any of those things are good, of course they aren't, but these are systemic issues, rather than individual ones. Labelling some people as enemies is not going to be productive. I of course don't wish any of you any harm.
I do realize that my conduct might not be ideal, and I should reflect on how I could express my opinions more productively, so I'll do that.
Imagine if Linux, systemd, rsync, etc suddenly became proprietary freeware. You could still use them for free, but you can't get the source code anymore, and contributing would become almost impossible.
It's perfectly alright when e.g. WinRAR publishes a freeware version, but when existing FLOSS projects become proprietary freeware, that'd feel like a rugpull, and many people would be very angry, and maybe even angry enough to fork. We've seen the same reaction wrt Android, Redis, Minio, etc.
Projects that embrace LLM written code often become impossible to read & edit manually, and handwritten contributions are usually not really possible anymore, because the project is changing so quickly that you can't keep up.
E.g. with rsync, no one understands the new LLM generated patches enough to backport the fixes to previous versions, which is why even debian gave up and did a feature update of the package (!)
In many ways, some of our favourite FLOSS projects are turning into something else, which is maybe still freeware, but it's certainly not the kind of free & open source software we've had for the past decades.
Imagine if Linux, systemd, rsync, etc suddenly became proprietary freeware
I don't need to. Why do you think me imagining this is relevant to this discussion?
Projects that embrace LLM written code often become impossible to read & edit manually, and handwritten contributions are usually not really possible anymore, because the project is changing so quickly that you can't keep up.
That's not the problem of LLMs. Tons of JS-web-frontend-ecosystem code is slop of the worst kind, should we invent a #nooblang tag to slap on everything JS-adjacent?
E.g. with rsync, no one understands the new LLM generated patches enough to backport the fixes to previous versions, which is why even debian gave up and did a feature update of the package (!)
Funny you talk about it, because this is something I just did for myself in my private fork just shy of a month ago, so your quantifier is simply invalid. I understand them. It is very possible to understand what these patches do.
It does not help that rsync itself is not exactly a shining example of good architecture, and the use of problematic APIs was pervasive in rsync, so the patches had to be quite pervasive too — but that's hardly the fault of Tridge's use of an LLM.
Also, beggars can't be choosers. Do I need to remind you that the choice here was not between "Tridge's LLM-assisted patches" and "hypothetical perfect patches closing the same CVEs with two lines of incredibly well-thought out changes", but between "Tridge's LLM-assisted patches" and nothing? If someone wanted to volunteer their perfect code towards the perfect hypothetical above, I'm sure Tridge would have been delighted to accept it.
I don't need to. Why do you think me imagining this is relevant to this discussion?
I assume you're engaging in an honest discussion, which means you'll need to understand what the other side is feeling and fearing. That requires imagining this analogy.
If you don't want to understand the other side, and only care about spreading your opinion, maybe you should take a step back from this discussion?
That's not the problem of LLMs. Tons of JS-web-frontend-ecosystem code is slop of the worst kind, should we invent a #nooblang tag to slap on everything JS-adjacent?
Of course it is a problem caused by LLMs. Code generated by LLMs is harder to understand and more cumbersome to edit.
And if LLMs weren't massively accelerating the lines of code written, LLMs wouldn't be nearly as popular as they are. Their entire selling point is that you can now produce more code with less thought put into it.
This works both ways. An honest discussion requires both sides to clearly enunciate their points, and be willing to explain and substantiate them. A discussion where one side is throwing out vague analogies with heavily implied malevolence and then demanding that the other side "is required to understand" them (or else), it is not much of an honest discussion.
I don't understand why you're trying to pick a fight with me.
I haven't implied malevolence, I haven't said anything about "or else", I don't even necessarily share these feelings.
All I've done is try to explain why people can feel like it's a rugpull. It doesn't matter if these feelings are based in reality, they're still real.
But you're right, I could make my own position more clear:
I believe that we can all agree that this is massively changing the way free software is being developed.
I'd argue that we've seen only two changes like this before:
Whether this new change is good or bad is something for the historians to decide, but I think it's clear that the equilibrium of the past 20 years is going the way of the dodo.
I don't understand why you're trying to pick a fight with me.
Did I? I did not. Between the two of us, you replied to my comment first, with what I believe to be a vague analogy with a negative connotation (about how LLM usage is akin to rugpulling free software into proprietary freeware). The implication of malevolence is right there, in the word "rugpull". I challenged your analogy and whether it is relevant, and challenged your comment on its substance as well. Then you replied with quite a pick-a-fight-y comment about how it was "required" for me to "imagine" your analogy (or else, you said, I "only care about spreading my opinion" and don't engage in good faith, and hence I ought to "step back" from the discussion).
So no, I did not pick a fight with you. From my perspective, you picked a fight with me, and I'm challenging it, because I don't want poor arguments to stand.
Projects that embrace LLM written code often become impossible to read & edit manually, and handwritten contributions are usually not really possible anymore, because the project is changing so quickly that you can't keep up.
[citation needed]
You are equating any LLM use with “people are generating huge amounts of code they don’t read”, i.e. Vibecoding.
You are equating any LLM use with “people are generating huge amounts of code they don’t read”, i.e. Vibecoding.
Do you work on a team? I have seen even the most ardent persons turn into slop mongers after enough time with the agents.
Is your argument that anybody who uses LLMs inevitably turns into a “slop monster”?
It is the evidence I have, and the story I have read from others working in teams. See: https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/
Projects that embrace LLM written code often become impossible to read & edit manually
[citation needed]
It doesn't need to happen all the time to cause worry and fear, it happening sometimes is enough.
Just like cattle refuse to go near electric fences, even if they only shock once per minute.
Maybe we should not make decisions like cattle do
Oh I fully agree with that. But we can't always get what we want.
This isn't the first time either. Remember the massive anti-GPL smear campaign and FUD from Microsoft and Google? Large change always creates fear and panic.
And LLMs are radically changing the way code is written & the way we collaborate.
This isn't the first time either. Remember the massive anti-GPL smear campaign and FUD from Microsoft and Google?
I have no idea how this relates, but I don’t remember any anti GPL campaign from Google. I remember an anti Linux campaign from Microsoft
Large change always creates fear and panic.
Which is why instead of keeping our cool we should run in circles like chicken and call everything Vibecoding?
with rsync, no one understands the new LLM generated patches enough to backport the fixes
That's a heavy exaggeration. Here's an example patch selected at random. https://github.com/RsyncProject/rsync/commit/15d296425609a997f56eb8f9017ff73922f99b20 I wish security patches in other projects were this clear and came with validation tests.
If the tag is to mean “LLM mentioned somewhere”, which can be a fair tag to have, then it should have a name that’s more generic. “Vibecoding” has a specific meaning that is not any use of LLM.
I don’t have any context for the broader tagging discussion. Just my 2c as someone who’s enjoyed coming here and filtering LLM-related posts: it’s a breath of fresh air. Naturally, I might enjoy reading some posts that involve LLMs - they’re obviously useful. I use them for many things, occasionally heavily, and I’ve tinkered with training. But I’m just here to say: it’s felt nice coming somewhere that has a space for technical discussions outside the gravitational field of one topic.
I think you're missing out on a lot of interesting posts because the tag is used so liberally and often completely incorrectly. That's one of my problems regarding this whole issue.
I would love to filter out all sloppy code and project links on this site but if I did I genuinely lose out on a lot of nuanced interesting discussions and posts entirely tangential to, or sometimes completely unrelated to, AI/LLM discussion.
I am very interested in what Filippo has to say about anything, including NIST elliptic curves, but I would've not seen that post at all had I filtered the tag.
There's two topics here. It is useful to separate them.
First, should there be a tag so people can filter out posts that mention the use of LLMs? - Sure, seems fine, lots of people want that.
Second, should that tag be spelled "vibecoding" - And, no. No it should not.
In the rest of the world, "vibecoding" has two meanings: first, as a neutral description of a repo where the author didn't even look at the code (used often by the people making the repo themselves); second, as a derogatory term for something where an LLM was used at all. Here, the term is used in the broader sense, which therefore reads as derogatory (and indeed many people who want the tag in its broad sense mean it in to be derogatory). Having a derogatory tag is absurd. It's defined to apply to things about "using AI/LLM tools", so spell it "llms" or "llm-usage".
This is hardly the first time this has come up. (I see the author of that last one also deactivated their account shortly after that thread, hm.) I have not yet seen a convincing counterargument. It is unclear to me what the opposition is, if any.
Language use evolves and I don't think "the rest of the world" is nearly as simple or consistent as you suggest. For example, Epic Games recently announced:
We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.
Epic employs talented and well paid engineers, and is applying the descriptor to their own work. One can assume they don't think it's derogatory, and also don't think it only applies to not looking at all or not knowing what you're doing.
It is true that some people use the word in a different way. That's true of every word. I stand by my description as broadly accurate.
(Also, I didn't say "not knowing what you're doing", and for all I know they didn't actually look much at the code. That's what I assumed they meant.)
We vibe coded the Epic Games Launcher to be faster than the other guy.
I looked that one up - it's from the "Epic Games Store" account (confusingly using the username @EpicGames even though the display name includes the word Store) on Twitter.
Looks to me like they're A/B testing launch messages for their new faster launcher - they also tried A new and improved launcher has entered the chat and Faster, smaller, sleeker and did I say faster? and No cap 🧢 just the facts.
If you feel tag X includes posts you want to read, then don't filter it. But it's the #2 filtered tag on Lobsters, likely it's providing value to more people than any other tag.
Also, remember to flag and hide content that is created without meaningful human authorship.
You can also flag comments derailing conversations into classic arguments, well-intentioned or not. Comments discussing the LLM-ness of a (non-meta) story for me are already classic arguments.
I'm hiding this conversation because 90 comments floods /comments.
my experience on lobsters has been way better since i filtered the tag. it happens to fit my taste. i don't think everyone loses.
I think it may be useful for a moderator to remove vibecoding as a tag from this post - I get the sense from this discussion that it would be different if people who are filtering out vibecoding were involved.
I half wonder if it would make sense to generally exempt all meta posts from tag filtering, for that reason.
I was surprised in the course of this discussion to learn the vibecoding tag's filter is dwarfed by the people filtering meta, at 1389. I wonder why that is.
Some people feel that all meta discussion is offtopic navel-gazing. They're here for the computing discussions and nothing else. (That's my extrapolation from a couple people I know who intensely dislike meta discussion.)
It seems like the issue is really that it just takes a couple of people who want to apply it to everything, for it to be applied way too broadly? Rather than the tag being inherently bad. Also why some posts that should be tagged AI get tagged vibecoding instead.
In general there seems to be some issues with the user suggestion tagging system. Recently I think there was a post that was strangely tagged because two people had made different suggestions and only the intersection of the suggested tags were shown.
I believe there’s a higher quorum requirement for “vibecoding” to be applied than for other tags.
No need for beliefs, we have the source; we don't seem to have any special-cases there.
Such a change was proposed, and the idea was well-received, but I think nothing's happened yet.
Thanks, I was positive that a change was made recently (within the last 2 months) where the quorum for vibecoding was raised.
It was! The quorum requirement is now stored in the database. (Which also means that we do, indeed, no longer know what vibecoding requires...)
Huh, that doesn't fit in how the rest of the site works. With the current climate, making the tag quorum public would likely stir the hornets nest more, but in principle I don't like that we don't know how different tags work wrt. to self-moderation.
I strongly suspect a patch would be accepted to display the quorum number along with the hotness modifier on the tag page. (I don't want to see, nor do I think it'd be in the spirit of the rest of the site, who suggested which tags.)
Were it not for my ruby allergy, I'd offer such a patch myself.
I think it's great that all the slop gets labeled. There's a seemingly unstoppable information DDoS being carried out by LLM users and the vibecoding label helps me get a little more signal in my noise.
My personal opinion is that ai discussion is drawing away attention from discussion on other topics. So while I do participate in them, I try to semi regularly post about stuff that I find interesting that doesn't fall under the tag (various research, writeups, blogposts), but it doesn't really get too much traction.
I think there's just a general trend where people are only interested in the latest Claude news...
Filtering by tags is optional, is it not? If people really want to exclude posts that even distantly mention AI, that seems fine.
The current state is a problem, and you can't make an improvement without a suggested change, but in past discussions no suggested change has resulted in action.
Maybe we'd find it easier to agree on a desired state, or some details thereof, than a particular implementation? For example, I think:
What bothers me more is the witch-hunters flagging posts as “spam” when they involve anything AI-generated — they’re effectively trying to censor this site. You can already filter out the vibecoding tag; why go the extra length of trying to stop everyone from seeing posts that offend you but are demonstrably interesting to many others?
By now the point scores are useless and I’ve switched to the chronological view so I don’t miss good stuff that’s been piled on by haters, like the post on the Goose language.
How you can censor something when the tag isn't filtered by default? Those who want to read about LLM usage will keep seeing it, those who don't will filter the tag. This has been the case for every tag in this site and yet I don't see people posting "rust" or "web" or "formalmethods" submissions complaining this damn much.
From the perspective of someone who filters both ai and vibecoding, I'm happy with the filtering I am getting. The vibecoding tag is being applied in a way I don’t object to.
The problem is that AI people hate the vibecoding tag being applied to articles they like because the word “vibecoding” is derogatory. Filo left lobste.rs because of this.
My suggestion is to rename the tags to be emotionally neutral. My suggestion:
ai ⇒ ai-theory
vibecoding ⇒ ai-usage
The problem is that AI people hate the vibecoding tag being applied to articles they like because the word “vibecoding” is derogatory. Filo left lobste.rs because of this.
I think part of the problem is that labeling anyone who uses LLMs in any capacity "AI people" is the kind of divisive language that contributes to this site-wide toxicity.
I think part of the problem is that labeling anyone who uses LLMs in any capacity "AI people"
You don't even need to use LLMs in any capacity, it is enough to not hate LLMs.
Anyone who does not hate LLMs enough (to support the slapping of an obviously derogatory brand on submissions left and right) is "AI people".
I support your right to have a strong ethical system. But I'm not sure that lobsters is the battlefront you want it to be
No, sorry for the confusion, it's not my ethical system, and I really hope for lobsters to stop being that battlefront. I was just expanding on the grand-parent's observation.
I could get on board with that with the caveat that "ai-usage" be restricted to "GenAI as applied to software engineering".
I like the tag and kind of how it is used currently. What I think that causes a bit of a problem is its name "vibecoding", because of the negative connotations for many, so it doesn't really work great for LLM, LLM adjacent or LLM related.
I would love a better tag, used how it is used currently, and perhaps filtering the tag considering other tags on the post. For example, I wouldn't want to filter that tag if it is together with "meta". Not sure how feasible that is though.
At the end, it seems that this keeps coming back as a meta post. Is this one adding anything new from last time? Not really.
I'd vote, if there is a vote, for splitting it. I don't filter but I do consider tags (and hidden count) when deciding whether or not to read the article. I took the "vibecoding" tag to mean that the post was generated slop, boosterism, or argumentation. That is not how it's being used and I've stopped paying attention to it. Will additional tags fix that? I don't know.
I'll ask (myself) a set of questions: Are LLM's tools? Yes. Is it possible to use LLM's productively? Yes, I believe one can. Are the current LLM's ethically trained and offered by trustworthy people? No to both. Is it ethical to use an unethically trained LLM? I don't believe so. Is arguing these Q&A's in every thread productive? Absolutely not. Is rehashing these points the most interesting part of the conversation about an article? No, not for me, thanks.
If I were creating a tag hierarchy, I'd separate it out entirely. These aren't catchy but it should make the point:
I. AI
A. Research
B. Meta
B1. General (likely flamefest...)
B2. Politics & Law
C. Application
C1. AI-Using
C2. Vibecoding
Then one could choose their level of filtering. If they don't want anything related in some way to AI then filter the top level. If they want to skip the meta-discussions, filter 'B'.
It got silly when posts talking about LLMs in general got tagged. It got useless when posts even mentioning some project created with LLMs in passing got tagged.
The tag description is "Using AI/LLM, coding tools. Don't also tag with ai.".
Now it actually got harmful to the community when tagging posts turns away very valuable members
It would be sad if the post where they announced it wasn't so deeply unserious:
I feel more and more like I don't belong in almost any tech community because I believe LLM agents are real, passkeys are good, and fascism is bad.
Yes, the platform where Nazi apologia and racism is consistently removed (I can't link to specific Moderator Log events, sadly) and the top of all time posts are these, it's the one that doesn't want you to think "fascism is bad".
Please split it or kill it. But we'd be better off without what exists today.
I agree with changing the name of the tag because it really, really sucks. Or to make a new category of "Content Warning" flags.
I believe the context is that these are 3 values from different groups which result in minimal overlap. I.e. he's not saying that all 3 are contrary to lobsters, but that if you believe all 3 every larger tech community will have people highly negative towards your content.
Which isn't all that strange when you remember that they aren't exactly uncorrelated.
Yeah, I'm sad to see Valsorda go but what he wants is just as difficult to achieve as the desire of antis to see "the tech world as it was before LLMs" by filtering a tag. Support of coding agents and passkeys is the "pro-corporate" stance, but of course big tech companies are the ushers of modern fascism. You could go on Twitter to see people happily discussing those two but you'd also be surrounded by blood-and-soil racists.
There are enthusiast communities which enjoy genAI and oppose fascism, but the centralised nature of passkeys is anathema to such tinkerers. People who love passkeys and hate fascists... might exist in some corners of Mastodon? Which are of course extremely LLM-unfriendly. It's just an unusual combination of opinions to feel strongly about 😅
It’s an interesting set of thoughts (I wouldn’t call them values) in that I believe them too. Yet I think there is a difference. 🙂
What I find problematic is that it’s widely used as a big implicit downvote. Most of my recent submissions about browser/web security got the tag applied by someone else. "lots of people won't see you anymore, because you touched the devil's machine" is kinda weird.
Some people want to continue developing like they have for the past decade or two, without constantly seeing LLMs everywhere.
So they filter the vibecoding tag as a way to keep a pre-AI style view of lobsters, in a certain sense a "what would the lobsters front page look like if LLMs had never been invented?"
Why do you see content warnings (which is what this tag is primarily used for) as an implicit downvote?
If users who didn't want to see your post were forced to see it, that'd surely create even more debate in the comments below these posts.
Those people will not get what they want this way, because LLMs are used too widely. A frontpage that excludes any peripheral mention of LLMs will therefore no longer cover most of the industry. If we want to address this problem by banning LLMs IRL, I can get on board with that; banning discussion of LLMs from a news aggregator just means that it ceases to aggregate news.
"troll" once meant someone deliberately setting out to get a negative emotional response from people on the internet. Now it can still mean that, but also "someone who is disagreeable" and "someone I have a negative emotional response to".
Words with a negative valence I think always risk this semantic drift, and hence "vibecoding" moved from "generating code using AI without looking at it" (which to many programmers is quite negative) to "any application of AI for software development". "Slop" started as low quality AI generated content, and now it just means anything generated by AI.
It makes sense that we've been speedrunning this, given the strong negative feelings enough people have about anything AI. If you think any application of AI is bad, of course everything is slop.
"Vibecoding" now covers this vast gray area between not looking at the code at all to reviewing the shape, to reviewing every line as written by AI. That's weird, but I think it's the semantic shift again.
I think we need new words to express the difference that are a bit more resilient against semantic drift. A word that expresses strong engagement with code that's developed using AI, even though doing so has cognitive friction, to express what people do rather than don't do. Then one may still reject all of it, but we will have words to distinguish between a case where people engage with code with an engineering perspective versus not at all.
P.S. Before AI, almost nobody looked at all the code a project uses, because we reuse libraries and frameworks and programming language implementations and operating systems. For many projects moreover it's always been so that not everybody on a team reads every single line that's actually in the project's repository. The difference is that all this code had a human provenance, not that people read every single line.
"troll" once meant someone deliberately setting out to get a negative emotional response from people on the internet.
Dear Sir,
I wish to object in the strongest possible terms to this grossly unfair characterization. Why should I be tarred with the epithet "troll" merely because I vented my spleen on the Internet? (Even vicious personal attacks are not trolling, per se.) Furthermore, at the same time your definition casts too wide a net, it is simultaneously also too narrow, excluding humble folk (like myself) who seek to provoke a positive reaction (to wit: mirth) with our performance.
In the future, please desist from such inaccurate misrepresentations. For the record, a troll is one who feigns a position, attitude, or identity in order to elicit a reaction.
Yours Truly,
Jack the Ripper
Should the tag be removed, or should it be renamed to be less incendiary?
As is, I don't think it could have any meaningful name. It's really "vaguely-3rd-degree-llm-related" at the moment. But I'm not sure people would go with that ;)
I'd be happy with some better categories for people who want to filter out that content. (llm-written, llm-development, llm-vaguely-mentioned)
If we aren't banning LLM writing (or writing with some LLM assistance) then I think a format tag for it is a good idea. Like how we have for pdf or video, not sure what I'd call it though.
(To be clear I'd prefer LLM prose was outright banned)
I flag submissions that are obviously and egregiously LLM-written as spam.
I don’t want a tag implying such submissions are on-topic.
Fair point.
But I was thinking unfortunately it can be more nuanced than that maybe? An entirely or almost entirely llm written article is absolutely not on-topic, basically no matter the content.
Say a post is made by a larger company, say OpenAI or Anthropic, or even Google or Meta, with very obviously LLM written prose. Is that banned? Even if the content is "important" like a security incident report, or otherwise on-topic (speaking hypothetically)?
I like this idea of a new format tag. My first thought was something like genai-output, to also capture submissions that are video/image output from generative models.
But, and hear me out: What if we just called that tag slop? It would cater to people who want to filter out unwanted AI-generated submissions, and while it will always differ between people where the line is exactly, I would be fine with that tag being applied pretty liberally when the submission has been created with LLM or genAI tools.
The existing ai and vibecoding tags could then be used for the content, and applied independently of slop.
I would be fine with that tag being applied pretty liberally when the submission has been created with LLM or genAI tools.
Tags imply that the content is welcome, flags that it isn't. And AI-written articles already fall under spam per the rules.
It was always badly named. I made this point way back when it was introduced, vibe coding isn’t and never was any usage of AI whatsoever.
In the industry I don’t see vibe coding even being used as a proxy to AI code in the software lifecycle and has a definite derogatory connotation.
The fact that it continues to be applied for all and any AI usage seems a deliberate choice rather.
Why not have two tags, vibe coding and agentic coding? There are mature technical aspects to appreciate in the latter, and I personally want to see serious content which develops processes, standards or practices for coding with LLMs. This just seems like a public service imperative on some level because people who criticize AI slop are on point with some of their criticism. I agree that there should be a way to filter out posts or projects which someone did not think about during development because the practice of engineering necessitates knowing how your entire system works. I don’t think using LLMs changes how someone is as an engineer, or the level of their technical expertise or knowledge.
The vibecoding tag is for discussions of LLM use; not for marking LLM-enhanced/generated content.
LLMs use or no use is a modern flame war. Imagine if users began to tag articles with linux and emacs just because a post author has 88x31 buttons in the page footer proudly mentioning these products. It's nonsense.
Misusing the local tagging system to communicate your personal stance on the LLM use for proofreading a blog text or AI-generating code -- it is abuse.
It's okay to dislike LLMs, but please use Lobsters tags properly and find another way or outlet for your anti/pro stance on LLM use.
How to help the problem for real? I don't know. Maybe:
Your ideas?
In my opinion, positive discussion on GenAI and LLMs should be heavily discouraged, as it is fundamentally very unethical and anti-social technology. I don't think it should be condoned anywhere.
This is not even about positive discussion of GenAI. I welcome tags that would let people filter that. But a complete write-up of a vulnerability with the use of LLM is mentioned by-the-way in 3 places and doesn't really matter for the content? https://lobste.rs/s/np84oh/pwnescape_guest_host_kvm_escape_cve_2026 A weird anti-ai page? https://lobste.rs/s/1kesjm/abolish_ai_manifesto A "what is math today" satire? https://lobste.rs/s/qvomvk/why_are_we_even_doing_all_this A post about how anthropic likely copying their design? https://lobste.rs/s/plcgps/anthropic_s_scion_is_heavily_inspired_by
None of them are really positive discussions of GenAI. The first one could maybe barely classify, but it's not even close to a major topic there.
Frankly, I don’t think your opinion counts for much. In your first month on this site you have no submissions and of the ~28 of your comments visible to me, ~26 of them are low-effort pot-stirring on the topic of AI. Whichever side you’re on, this isn’t the kind of discussion I want to encourage.
as it is fundamentally very unethical and anti-social technology
Lobsters is not your personal warfare board of what you deem ethical or not - that's a rabbit hole so deep we won't ever be done with. Nor is this kind of comment about what I'd call a slow-burning-war on the vibecoding tag in any way helpful.
What are you doing instead then, and how is that going? Or is this really just about how you'd like people to shut up and take the slop?
I think this comment crosses the line and violates site rules.
Climate: Lobsters is more of a garden party than a debate club. We're learning things we didn't know to be curious about and sharing what we've made. Disagreements are normal but fights are not; it's OK to make your point, share a resource, and let someone be wrong. Abuse and bigotry are unwelcome.
Can you please try to be constructive rather than antagonistic?
I wish we had "vibecoding" and "vibecoded" as separate tags. One for posts and discussio about genai, one for things made with it.
I for one think a lot of vibecoded software is kinda neat. It's good to know what it is so I don't give it the keys to my house, but i still want to see it even if I don't want to read another article about vibecoding rn.
Applying the vibecoding tag here is only going to create a “bubble”, and seems like a terrible idea for building a cohesive community.
Like in any industry, you're either part of the change and jump in the band wagon, or you're a bug on the windshield.
Bandwagoning and shunning those who don't join isn't universal, and seems much more common in the tech industry than other industries. Probably related to why our industry is such a shitshow.