social-app/CLAUDE.md at main · bluesky-social/social-app

The Bluesky Social application for Web, iOS, and Android - bluesky-social/social-app

GitHub
I mean when I check my feed much of the Bluesky eng team seems to be posting about how great Claude is all the time so I have been background wondering how common vibecoding is in that ecosystem
Let's see if anyone on Bluesky / the ATmosphere can say more https://bsky.app/profile/dustyweb.bsky.social/post/3mg6qipl6a22o
Christine Lemmer-Webber (@dustyweb.bsky.social)

Curious if vibecoding / AI agent assisted dev is currently common in ATmosphere dev? The feelings about AI generated code are def different on here than on fedi, so... I see a CLAUDE.md in bluesky-social/social-app https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/blob/main/CLAUDE.md

Bluesky Social

Example: https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3meomclcfss2w

> Until December of last year I was using LLMs as fancy autocomplete for coding. It was nice for scaffolding out boilerplate, or giving me a gut check on some things, or banging out some boring routine stuff.
>
> In the past two months Claude has written about 99% of my code. Things are changing. Fast

Why (@why.bsky.team)

Until December of last year I was using LLMs as fancy autocomplete for coding. It was nice for scaffolding out boilerplate, or giving me a gut check on some things, or banging out some boring routine stuff. In the past two months Claude has written about 99% of my code. Things are changing. Fast

Bluesky Social

I have this suspicion that the ATproto stack, at least the stuff from Bluesky, is heading towards "majority-vibecoded" but that's mostly just from seeing a lot of posts from the Bluesky eng team rather than me having spent much time in the codebase

Why is def hugely responsible for much of Bluesky/ATProto's design and if *he's* mostly letting Claude write 99% of his code, the rest of the eng team is likely to be heading in that direction too?

Also https://bsky.app/profile/pfrazee.com/post/3meogr22l3k2d

> A year ago, I thought LLMs were kind of neat but not that useful. I saw the code autocomplete and thought, meh.
>
>Last summer just flipped. I never ever thought I would see automated code generation like we see now.
>
> I know there’s baggage but you need to know the coders are being real about this

Paul Frazee (@pfrazee.com)

A year ago, I thought LLMs were kind of neat but not that useful. I saw the code autocomplete and thought, meh. Last summer just flipped. I never ever thought I would see automated code generation like we see now. I know there’s baggage but you need to know the coders are being real about this

Bluesky Social
Samuel (@samuel.fm)

I'm thinking something like this

Bluesky Social

Welp, there we go https://bsky.app/profile/why.bsky.team/post/3mgaqaaisfs2e

> Oh interesting, people who don’t know how to build software are getting mad at my post about building software. Cute.
>
> Let me be clear, over the next year, the job of software engineer will shift dramatically to no longer have typing syntax into an editor as its primary time sink.

Why (@why.bsky.team)

Oh interesting, people who don’t know how to build software are getting mad at my post about building software. Cute. Let me be clear, over the next year, the job of software engineer will shift dramatically to no longer have typing syntax into an editor as its primary time sink.

Bluesky Social
(I don't think the line "people who don't know how to build software" means me specifically but I did wonder for a bit there)

You can guess my opinions, but I have left them out of this particular thread. My goal here was actually just to see if my gut sense was correct that Bluesky was heading in a vibecoding direction. I think that feels fairly confirmed based off the discourse I highlighted and also what seems to be an indirect response from Bluesky's team (though I think that's more because of what @davidgerard wrote about it than what I did)

Anyway, gnarly time, but people can decide for themselves whether that aligns with their values. One thing seems for sure: it's a bet many orgs are making, and this will be one thing where in the ~decentralized space we'll be learning much more about whether that bet pays off and results in a better or worse ecosystem over time.

It does seem like I kinda kicked off A Discourse but I mean, it feels like it's worthwhile for people to know whether or not the infrastructure they are relying on is increasingly vibecoded or not, at minimum, so they can make decisions for themselves.
@cwebber christine you beautiful troll <3 shine on you agent of magnificent chaos
@cwebber idea: someone should go and download the bluesky source code, implement a nice activitypub integration, and then publish it 10,000s of times across the internet in all sorts of places that are likely to get picked up by AI scrapers. no reason :3
@aeva @cwebber Shine on You! Chaos Agent

@cwebber ai usage has been normalised in most of the atproto dev ecosystem for a while now. just as some recent other examples,

tangled's seed round also explicitly mentions ai agents for coding as a use case (https://blog.tangled.org/seed) , and semble also targets ai agents as a use case (https://blog.cosmik.network/updates-february-2026)

announcing our €3,8M seed round

and more on what's next

@cwebber and yeah, the semi permeable separation between ap and atproto actually provides a very interesting real world testing ground now to see how dev ecosystems develop regarding ai usage, with it being a taboo in fedi and normalised in the atmosphere

@laurenshof is it a taboo or are people less willing to spend significant amounts of money, energy and water on generative frontier ai & thus contributing to bigtech becoming even more powerful & destroying our planet? Using models mostly (not all) built on theft & badly treated data wranglers? Do we really need to sacrifice all on the altar of AI?

@cwebber

@laurenshof

I'm ambivalent about AI. Like all tech it has good & bad sides, for example the promise of empowerment & the destruction of it. Yet at this moment the bad stuff seems to mostly outweigh the good since I belief all other things mentioned are more important to me than the (promised) efficiency.

I guess the devil is in the details.

@cwebber

@BjornW @laurenshof @cwebber I think this reply explains well why it's taboo to engage in LLM discussions on fedi. If people cannot engage in a topic without strong negative emotions going toward them, it's taboo. There is a lot of case where things should be taboo, and for the better or for the worse fedi thinks using LLMs are taboo

@res260
Please read my full reply, including my ambivalence towards AI. I'm happy to discuss this topic in different directions.

@laurenshof @cwebber

@BjornW @laurenshof @cwebber

I don't doubt that you are, I'm just pointing out that this specific reply is a good representation of how people react to LLM discussions in general on fedi. This is not the case on Bluesky, so it's normal that people self-censor because no one likes getting negative replies to their posts.

For me, the vibe on fedi is: don't openly talk about positive things regarding LLMs, criticizing is okay, asking questions is okay

@res260 you might be right.

The Fediverse might seem way more negative than other spaces due to an AI Overton Window.

The mainstream seems mostly celebrating AI as a silver bullet solution for lots of (social) issues. It's questionable at best if (at all) & how AI might contribute to this. At the same time there's less attention to the side-effects of AI itself.

The Fediverse might counter-weigh this overly positive mainstream view at AI.?

@laurenshof @cwebber

@laurenshof @cwebber ewww, that list of financiers make me want to vomit.

Counting the days until Forgejo instances can cross-federate!

@cwebber yeah my skeet is somewhere over 1.5k reposts

it appears the jankiness of bsky is not popular with the user base

@cwebber That really rubbed me the wrong way but I'm assuming he's catching heat from anti-AI people of all levels of tech proficiency or lack there of.
@cwebber I wonder, too, if typing syntax into an editor has ever been the biggest time sink. Not for me, anyway.
@carto @cwebber When I did software engineering many moons ago, my most productive moments was where I was leaned back staring at the ceiling. If I'm writing code, I'm mostly just manifesting the solution I've already worked out in my head. Understanding is way more difficult than coding.
@carto @cwebber look why is just a very slow typer

@davidgerard @carto @cwebber we spend all day at our keyboards, anyone that uses the “too much typing” should get a mechanical keyboard with some cherry mx blues and relish in the act of typing, hear the distinctive click of each key, use keyboard shortcuts. Use a typing website like ratatype, monkeytype, or others. I just started playing Glyphica, it’s fun, complete typing game.

The TLDR for the above paragraph is the typing argument is bs.

@davidgerard @carto @cwebber just like they learned to program they can learn to type fast. I was a terrible typist. People with accessibility needs managed as well before without LLMs.

The reason is perceived mental effort. It feels really hard to expend all the mental energy to program. But it actually takes more kilowatts to use an LLM than a human brain for the same task.

@davidgerard @carto @cwebber when you work in a language you’re familiar with and can type fast you can be expressive as English (for English speakers). That was ES5 for me back when I used to write it. Now my current projects are Rust and Lua, and maybe I’ll get back to programming at the speed of thought. There’s only one way to do that though.
@cwebber hm. they don’t either. LLMs don’t even do engineering or development - just “programming”?
@[email protected] Since Grok vibe codes X, it has become the everything app that Elon Musk promised. It cleans the dishes, carries the car to car wash, teaches the penguins latin, finds new bosons, programs the video recorder and sets the time to 12, and does everything else.
@Life_is @cwebber don't forget aligning the universal energies of the starborn meta-consciousness
@cwebber
Reminds me a little of the evangelists for the microwave oven and how they claimed it would replace every other way of cooking.
@kirtai @cwebber yeah everyone knows that's the air fryer
@davidgerard @kirtai @cwebber
What? The George Foreman grill is all you need. If you can't grill it, you don't need to eat it.
@cwebber yeah he's still his insufferable arrogant idiot self
@cwebber Typing is their primary timesink while developing? Not thinking?

@KatS @cwebber Well, I lost it when I heard folk talk about the benefits of generating test code.

This is what validates your spec (what you think the code should do) against your implementation (what your code actually does).

If you must generate code, generate everything *but* the tests.

@cwebber The idea that the primary timesink of a software engineer is typing is bizarre.
@itamarst @cwebber even for me it isn't and I am frankly terrible at not looking up stupid syntax questions all the time
@itamarst @cwebber I know, right? I find it really puzzling when I hear this idea that software engineers spend our time just typing.
For me, it varies depending on whether I'm adding new functionality, modifying existing, or bug-fixing, etc. but I'd say I spend most of my time reading and understanding existing code and the model it represents, and reconciling that with expectations about what it should be.
Actually typing code is usually a small of it for me, but I wouldn't throw it out as I want to be sure it reflects the real work that preceded it.
@cwebber I'm really not a huge fan of how ready people seem to be to just completely relinquish their ability to code. It does not take long for your brain to wallpaper over entire skillsets.
@cwebber also, I can see this type of situation very, very easily spiraling into a classic "death by convenience."
How long until the primary engineers no longer understand the how their program is built or what motivated ostensibly insignificant decisions that eventually add up

@cwebber This is a big yikes for me: https://bsky.app/profile/blaine.bsky.social/post/3mgasb7ox6k2g

Yes. It's not quite that simple, but yes. My theories on hiring is that the growth is in a whole lot of "non-technical" roles.

The idea of the only technically proficient part of the company being a blackbox language statistics engine is, on some level, frightening to me in a general sense

Blaine (@blaine.bsky.social)

Yes. It's not quite that simple, but yes. My theories on hiring is that the growth is in a whole lot of "non-technical" roles.

Bluesky Social
@brad @cwebber it's existentially frightening to me that a huge proportion of software we use will be/already is created like this
@brad
It's cultish, the machine told us we shouldn't question it.
@cwebber
@brad @cwebber it's the fucking Serious Business Manager Mindset. Chasing some supposed big-picture abstraction and seeking epic powerrrr megatools to manipulate that instead of the details… Perplexing and annoying that so many engineers are falling into it.
@valpackett @cwebber It's like there's a finish line they're trying to cross first.
@brad @cwebber People really seem to have their heads in the sand about this. Maybe you are able to use code agents effectively today, because you spent years getting yourself into shape. Is it really so inconceivable that in this new paradigm you might have to start going to the code gym to prevent decline?
@dvshkn @cwebber I really don't think people in general appreciate how quickly and permanently our brains are designed to adapt and remove things based on how we prioritize them. Even if you go to the code gym, if you're not using it in a way that grants material results, your brain will just donate that space to something else
@dvshkn @cwebber the book Live Wired (if you're into neuroscience/brain science/development) is pretty much entirely about this concept and there are multiple stories of people accidentally deleting entire skillsets of theirs during experiments
@dvshkn @cwebber in particular, one guy tries to add another sense by wearing a belt that vibrates on a gradient based on how North he's facing. After a couple of months, he realized that he no longer has the ability to map physical spaces in his mind AT ALL and it never came back after the experiment.
@brad @cwebber That's fascinating (and a bit scary). Thanks for the rec 
@brad One of my concerns around LLM use is that ultimately API design or library interface design is another kind of language design, and even at fairly small scales it's easy to create languages (albeit ones embedded in larger programming languages) that you don't truly understand.

@cwebber LLMs write better code* until the investors come knocking for their payouts, then the price goes up and LLMs aren't writing any code.

* they don't

@cwebber What's old is new again. Same idiots parroted this line back when "visual" IDEs and "languages" were all the rage.
Part of me sees this as the continuation end result
of programming being something people do for money.
Prior to dot-com, people that programmed were like
word workers. No one would slander the use and
skill in sharpening a chisel.

@cwebber I don’t think you have to be an expert on a thing to be allowed to have an opinion on a thing. You should be informed and you should probably hesitate if you’re not impacted by a thing. But since using AI impacts…checks notes…everyone, I think it’s fair for anyone to criticize it.
@cwebber yeah, least surprising Bluesky thing to do