The Psychotic Network FerretSome AI coder: "I" wrote this new thing that searches for hidden strings in files.
Most youngins: Oh wow, that is so useful, I wish I had this years ago!
Us greybeards: Congratulations, you reinvented grep.
This is absolutely a subtoot.
Lars Marowsky-Brée 😷@nuintari The irony is that this is a tool all the vibe coding harnesses use (including ripgrep).
I do wonder though if we've gone wrong somewhere on the "make this accessible and discoverable" side or if it really is almost exclusively a problem of willful ignorance.
spinnyspinlock@larsmb - I was not referencing a tool "everybody uses", it was posted yesterday. Somebody boosted it into my timeline, and they were mocked so much for boosting it, that they deleted the retoot as far as I can tell.
@spinnyspinlock - you've been warned, it is some truly awful python code.
https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/5/scan-for-secrets-3/
It's basically grep -f file-of-strings-to-find-including-common-encodings
@nuintari @spinnyspinlock I meant that the vibe coding harness they used to implement this likely and quite noticeably uses a better tool (ripgrep); if they even paid a modicum of the attention to the existing world around them, they'd have stopped.
Does anybody pay attention to what is going on around them in that headspace? It's all just, "Ohhh, I am so smart I don't even have to think, look what I can use these tools to do for me!"