I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using

https://lemmy.world/post/43939821

I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using - Lemmy.World

My wife needed a cycle tracker. Everything out there was either Flo (which got sued twice for sharing health data) or an abandoned GitHub project. So I built Ovumcy. Single Go binary, SQLite, Docker-ready. No analytics, no third-party APIs, no cloud. Your data stays on your server. Features: period tracking, symptom logging, predictions (ovulation, fertile window), statistics, CSV/JSON export, dark mode, Russian and English. Just pushed v0.2.5. Looking for feedback from real users.

I was going to recommend this to someone I know but when I realised your readme.md is entirely AI-generated, I guess the whole project is probably vibe-coded. I can’t in good conscience recommend someone trust their health data to a vide-coded app because they tend to have security problems.

Also all ai-generated code is public domain so your AGPL license is kinda empty. Might as well use MIT.

I do use AI tools while developing this project, but I also have a BSc in Computer Science. AI is a productivity tool.

Security is something I take seriously, especially since the project deals with health data. All code has test and you’re welcome to inspect the repository yourself or point out any specific security concerns if you notice them.

Regarding licensing: the AGPL license applies to the project as a whole regardless of the tools used to write parts of the code.

If you have concrete technical feedback or security issues, I’d genuinely appreciate it.

How does AI help with productivity? I’ve gotten so many false answers that I quit trusting it

@militaryintelligence @terraincognita

They are tools like any other, it's how you use them that matters.

No, they’re tools different from any other due to their nondeterministic nature. That, coupled with hallucinations, are the big differences that make me automatically dismiss anything using these tools.

All sounds a bit Greek to me. Free will vs determinism with a splash of Aristotle's distaste for contradiction.

Machine learning powers the cancer drugs that keep me alive, modern banking systems and the chess and rogue like apps I've been using since the 80's.

Wasn't long ago Gutternberg's devilry was ruining the world and destroying art and creativity, now peeps treating it like Hersiod's ages of God's & Heroes.

Imagine you are on the ground under your car and need a different tool. You ask for it and somebody hands it to you. That person is young and inexperienced. It is up to You to check if it’s the right tool, and if not pass it back (and in this example tell the person about the error and help them correct it).

And sure, You can always crawl out and get the tool yourself and sometimes that is the only option and in coding terms in my opinion best practice. But you can be faster with your helper. Use it appropriately and see how it affects your work. And that’s the point, your work. Don’t pass responsibility or thought off to AI.

Ok but give me a wrench example in coding terms. What wrench are you wanting? I really am curious
“how would you approach this task where I have x prerequisite and want y”
Because it’s able to write boilerplate faster than a human. And because it’s able to perform refactorings that are not possible with IDEs or regex due to their lack of structure. Also because you can ask it to review your files and it does find bugs that would otherwise be missed at first. There’s a huge difference between vibe-coded slop and using the tools available to you effectively.

I use it all the time as a kind of brainstorming tool.

“I want to do X (and details), can you tell me what tools or algorithms are available to me? List their pros and cons and give me some comparison”

Or on a somewhat recent project of mine, I has to effectively stub an entire library (but didn’t have to be done well), so I just told AI “take this page (the docs) and generate empty function stubs from it”. It doesn’t need to be high quality since it doesn’t run, it’s just to fool the dotnet engine.

I also tend to ask AI to add logging to some functions, since it’s annoying to do and impossible to mess up.

Best answer I’ve read. I get why it’s used, I just don’t trust it because there’s got to be a catch as hard as companies are pushing it. It’s available for free, so we must be the product somehow