Lately I’ve been trying to develop this discernment skill by filing issues on vibe-coded projects, which requires taking a deep look into them and questioning their premise.

For example, there’s a tensor serialization called Tenso (71 stars) which advertises better cache line alignment after array deserialization. I suspect it’s heavily vibe coded. I read its source code and discovered that unlike what the README claims, the arrays it produces aren’t actually 64-byte aligned after all. https://github.com/Khushiyant/tenso/issues/5 They also have some issues around bounds checking: https://github.com/Khushiyant/tenso/issues/4

Another example: there’s a library called protobuf-to-pydantic (145 stars, 21 forks, 4 dependent packages on PyPI). I wanted to use this for one of my projects. I’m not sure whether it’s vibe coded or not. I found that it creates syntax errors in the generated output code: https://github.com/so1n/protobuf_to_pydantic/issues/121 Seems like a pretty surprising issue to miss.

For Tenso, the code quality is less of an issue than the “should this even be built or is the premise of the work solving the wrong problem,” which I suspect will be a factor in a lot of AI-generated work going forward.

I’m torn. On the one hand, I’m glad to be practicing this skill of “deciding what to rely on and what to refute,” but on the other hand, I certainly don’t feel like I’m being collaborative. These libraries could be their creators’ magnum opus for all I know. My issues just generate work for the project maintainers. I offer failing unit tests, but no fixes.

I earnestly think the future belongs to people who are able to “yes, and” in the right way rather than just tearing others’ work down as I’m currently doing. It’s hard to “yes, and” in a way that’s backed by a discerning skepticism rather than uncritiqueful optimism. Feels like a condradiction somehow.