It seems like every day I see someone launching a bullshit new project that is a cheap rip-off of something that someone put a lot of effort into. And to be clear, I don't really have anything against vibe coding.
What I do have something against, more philosophically than anything else, is someone launching a new project just to launch a new project. Something that they clearly don't have any interest in working on. It usually follows the same pattern too.
Someone launches a project that they have been working on, in earnest, and it gets a lot of attention.
Someone else sees that and thinks, "Oh I can make an open source version of this and if it takes off I can dedicate more time to it."
The problem is that people know you're not actually serious about this project. There was no committment, no sacrifice, no late nights trying to make it work. It's a cheap copy. It's like you printed a copy of an original painting and tried to pass it off as your own.
You see, I think software is like art. The best programs are thoughtful and elegant to the point where it feels like the creator knew exactly what you wanted, how you wanted it and built it specifically for you.
Your work is meant to be a reflection of you. If you're copying everyone else, then who are you really?
Well you're someone who just so desperately wants attention.
Please world, see my work. But it's not your work. Someone else put the time and effort into it. You just copied it.
Before LLMs, when someone announced a project, it was clear that they had spent time and energy working on a project because there was no other way to actually build the project. The audience recognized this and, as a result, they got a baseline level of respect as a reward for their effort and commitment.
Creation was expensive.
But that transaction has been intermediated. Creation has been cheapend.
And, in a market with faceless participants selling their cheap creations, that's fine.
But the tech community isn’t faceless. It’s one of the few places where an individual reputation can matter more than the organization behind you. There are dozens of well known engineers whose name means something because of what they've built, not because of where they've worked.
When creation is cheap, the audience looks to those who have strong reputations for building with care and committment.
Build something you're proud of. Something that shows your care and committment. Don't just point Claude at a closed source project and say, "build me an OSS version of this, make no mistakes."
Your reputation matters. Don't cheapen it.