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Dev Says He’s Getting Threats After Leaving a Booby Trap for Vibe Coders (gizmodo.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/47200357

One critic called the move “petulance beyond measure.”

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[–] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

When they talk about "ai agents," are they referring to the so called autonomous bots, or bots that can enter your development environment? Like openclaw.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    any usage of ai that allows it to execute tasks beyond simply outputting something to the user. if it interacts with stuff (especially with some degree of autonomy) it's an agent.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Got it. Why do people use agents? I've used vibe coding before, it is possible to copy-paste the boilerplate code you asked for, although you've got to then edit for about two hours...

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago

    With VSCode say, it gives you a live diff for every change. Loads the file you're working on and any in the project it thinks it needs into context. Streamlines the process while (assuming you're not insane enough to set it to auto accept everything) keeping you in the loop to review changes.

    Absolutely needs babysitting because if it twinges on the wrong stackoverflow post from 10 years ago or whatever it'll start asking for root access to modify drivers instead of modifying the php.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I guess they found a use case. I kinda use Gemini as one sometimes for pulling stuff from a picture of a PowerPoint and putting it in my schedule or for aggregating info about a group of products I'm trying to choose between. personally I don't see much use for ai in general beyond menial stuff like that but that stuff actually is pretty nice aside from the whole 'destroying the environment, economy, and several industries' part. almost makes me want to get a computer that can run it locally just so I can try and find a use case without the destruction.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I don't actually think AI is doing all of those things. I think the economy is already fucked and AI is a scapegoat for companies who were going to lay off a bunch of people anyway. I don't think the water and electricity consumption compares to the meat industry, but I could be wrong. I think it's weird that there is such an outrage over AI but not cattle, but I guess because people like beef more than they like hallucinated AI results.

    It's probably a good idea to self-host your own AI for privacy reasons alone, if you use it.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I mean the meat industry (fucked up as the factory farms are) produces food. that's very different from the ai industry, which in it's current state produces nothing of value. I get your point, but comparing where a lot of our food comes from to the ai industry isn't really a fair comparison.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 child)

    ....

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not gonna sit here and argue about whether it's ok to eat meat or not. the point is that supporting cloud-based AI is taking up a ton of resources and isn't providing much benefit for it compared to local AI. not sure why you took it in that direction in the first place, but using up nearly all of our ability to manufacture computer parts, large areas of land, lots of electricity, and lots of clean water, all for barely any benefit, is much worse in terms of resource usage (again, not going to argue about the morality of meat here) than sustaining cattle.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I’m not saying that all that stuff is good, I’m saying that focusing on the environment aspect is weird when the environmental aspect is minuscule compared to all of the other stuff we do.

    The other factors you mentioned such as increasing RAM prices are pretty much exclusive to ai and thus a better argument against it. Most people have computers or want a computer, most people have a phone, and so on

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    I don't use mine for coding, but it can be useful for editing stuff, since a lot of agent-based systems can edit parts of a file instead.

    The thing I have it do sometimes is parsing a bunch of markdown files, and parse data to put into the middle of a CSV, so it's not out of order. Since making a script read the markdown is non-trivial, and itls not something that needs to be done very often, it's easier to run a local model on the same machine and have it do that. Past a point, re-generating the entire file isn't feasible, since it either consumes so many tokens doing the output that it hits the output limit that's usually in place to prevent looping, or it takes an incredibly long time.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Is AI good for anything other than boilerplate code though? I worry when people talk about databases.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    First thing is to separate out the term AI from LLM's.

    AI as a term encompasses many different technologies, some going back decades, a lot of which is used all over the place.
    What we're hearing a lot about right now are LLM's and the surrounding ecosystem.

    To answer the question though, yes, they can be used to produce output that fits a use case.
    Whether or not it's the best tool for the job is subjective, even in the cases where it's technically viable.

    There is a lot of bias and a lot of arguments for both sides.

    You'd probably be best served by reading around a bit and figuring out how you feel about it.

    You're unlikely to get an unbiased discussion from a single source, especially here.
    I'm not excluding myself , I'm bias AF.

    The technology is interesting, the industrial implementation is an environmental and societal catastrophe.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Anyone who says yes is clearly not knowledgeable. Its like asking a spaghetti developer if they think their code is good. AI Physcosis is unlocking a new incompetence fear in me.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    I have some experience with vibecoding, and while it does help, it only cuts down on development time a little bit. I'm talking about markup language. I have a hard time imagining that someone can build an entire app with this.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    It depends. At least, I find that it has a habit of falling on its metaphorical face if the task is anything more complex than the simplest things, so the idea that people can use it to make viable programs is baffling to me.

    "Put these values into the CSV" works okay enough, but if you task it with more than that, like see if a column of values in the CSV is entered correctly from the markdown, it breaks.

    Or it gets stuck in a loop, and there's a very short point where it is faster to enter it by hand. Slightly ironic, though, that a language model doesn't do too well with natural language processing.

    I'd certainly not trust it for anything important like a production database, but the csv/markdown thing isn't, and it's no big deal if it gets destroyed by the model/agent, so it's interesting to poke around with, and feel out the limitations, so you know its strengths and weaknesses.

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