Apparently someone already wrote a whole production Swift wrapper for the AppleCVA face tracking framework I discovered. I'm pretty sure it was vibe coded.

This sucks. I'm doing this both to help people and to teach myself Swift and macOS programming. What's the point now?

I spent a whole day reverse engineering Apple binaries to work out the API and required input data. I didn't post the API header or docs but I did post logs with a lot of the required info. Enough for a slop machine to figure it out I guess.

This is really demoralizing. I was planning to stream this weekend to work on all this. Now I don't really feel like it any more.

I guess you can't even post reverse engineering logs now without risking people slopping their way ahead of you.

The slop machine even hard coded the exact same camera matrix from my example dumps, down to the fp64 rounding error (400 is actually a result of a calculation but the slop machine isn't smart enough to guess what it is).

(Also the math here is wrong, the slop version's entire take on resolutions and aspect ratios is nonsense)

Apparently I was so annoyed I didn't realize I typoed Swift as Switch... ^^;;

@lina I suppose it stands to reason, in a way, nothing has been done right? In just the same way I still write code despite knowing an alternative implementation doing exactly what I wanted already exists in the Library of Babel. There is clearly no design nor intent there - it amounts to merely noise.

At least that's my view

@gfaster @lina i think the issue from the programmer's perspective is that: a very large portion of users *will not care* that the implementation was slop-coded and *stolen*, only that it exists. the credit is erroneously going to go to the person who *stole* Lina's work and nearly none of the credit is going to go to Lina herself who actually did all the hard work here. programming and reverse engineering is very much a field where work being attributed and credited correctly is extremely important, especially when it comes to things like career advancement and just plain *satisfaction in one's work* so her being credited for being the one who did this work is really really important in general.

(you may notice I keep emphasizing the word *stolen* here. *stolen* is the only correct word to use here, Lina published her reverse engineering work and progress out of a sense of goodwill and a desire to be transparent to her community, and the slopcoder here stomped all over that and decided to steal *her* work that this person had no right to steal, and take all the credit for it by putting it through a slop generator.)

@amarioguy @gfaster
It's not even really "stolen", like if someone had done this a month later I couldn't care less, whatever. People will slop. It's also completely valid to take your time and do it by hand and while credit would be nice it's not required, I don't have a copyright on Apple's API.

It's this thing where AI can spit out MVPs with zero effort and time and so it allows these people to jump ahead of the person who had the idea in the first place, while investing zero time and learning nothing in the process.

Another example: https://bsky.app/profile/freya.bsky.social/post/3mhdsjgf7cc2h @acegikmo

Freya Holmér (@freya.bsky.social)

someone already vibecoded (a bad clone of) this and shared it online because we live in the worst timeline y'know it kinda disincentivizes me from sharing progress when there are slop ghouls around every corner, AI or otherwise

Bluesky Social
@lina @amarioguy @gfaster @acegikmo Oh, I love the term "Slop Ghouls" that Freya called the people stealing shit without any original thought.
@lina It'd be nice for there to be a *good* version, right? Not gonna get that from vibe-coded crap.

@lina quality vs. quantity I think is a worthy reason to keep going:

You took the effort to understand the framework.

"Vibecoders", horrible name for people that are more of managers / commissioners, looking at how they seem to go usually, likely at most just look at the output and if don't see anything obviously wrong, just push it to production.

So if this other other project is indeed machine-generated, which would seem so by the speed it came and the snippet you showed, it wouldn't sound far-fetched the in-depth understanding and by extension, the quality, are compromised.

Also, going by some experiences of my own, I would also note there are way too many people, some even seemingly well-intented, that want to drag down any ideas and projects, as well as those that brought such up. Can't say that's the case for this other individual, but if it is, you giving up also means the person wins.

And lastly, being the same solution on the snippet you showed, couldn't it be considered theft, specially if there's no attribution?

@lina You know how a lot of open source licensed code is completely unmaintained? With a small tiny “elite” being maintained.

My prediction is that LLM generated code open source code isn’t going to be maintained. There’s no fire nor passion there.

I think what you did is still worth while, and I think whatever you do is more worth while and more likely to amount to something beyond a proof of concept (which one time generated things really are).

@lina may they suffer the burden of expectations they cannot meet and infinite bugs 🙏
@lina Between the massive amounts of unmaintainable code being generated, junior devs not having the jobs that would give them the much needed experience, and the moral and financial hit on so much open-source software, AI's going to set us back years in the mid/long term.
@lina Aww, that must feel so bad🥲 How about this, rest up, clear your mind, and get back to it without thinking about their version. We still wanna see yours🙇‍♂️
I very much value the love and passion that you put into your projects. There are people who can see what you put into your work and value how and when it's expressed. I hope you still stream this weekend.