Probably. The website does look too good though, none of the design cruft ("eyebrows") that LLMs like. But the last design I let it do was from opus 4.7 or gpt 5.3.
Obviously they used AI at some point in the project, the question to you is what is your definition of vibe coding and how does it discredit the effort they did put into it?
One benchmark would be: would someone with a legacy FoxPro LOB app be entrusting their data to this? Or is it just a nice "wow, that's a cool project"?
The website is obviously and gratingly LLM-voiced. I don't know how people aren't tired of paragraphs like this yet:
"Visual FoxPro is a 32-bit program, and that decides more than it appears to. It is why a table stops at two gigabytes, why a memo file stops at two gigabytes, and why a big report runs out of memory on a machine with plenty to spare. The limits are signed 32-bit numbers buried in the file handling, not a licensing decision anybody made."
and
"The editor checks what you type through that very compiler, so what it underlines and what the runtime refuses cannot drift apart."
Right, yes, this sort of style certainly can be produced by writers, especially ones who are working in a particular corporate universe. That's where LLMs got it from! It just sucks that everyone "writes" like that now. Every new one-person project or company is incongruously spouting corporatese. Don't we get enough of that already? Flattening everything into American corpo-speak sucks.
It's not clear at first glance, but given (1) the apps are written in JavaScript (2) the project has repos for different OS native bindings, my bet is some kind of embedded JavaScript engine that just calls through to OS native widets
It's that they're a very insular, incestuous sub-culture whose origins come from early 2000s science fiction message boards and which has been distilled through the cod utilitarianism of the Effective Altruism people.
That doesn't mean the ideas are "bad" because "bad" is some infectious transitive property. But it does mean they are intellectually homogeneous; disdain experts in other fields; treat ethics as mathematical functions with infinite-sized terms; and whose opinions about AI pre-date the development of LLMs themselves.
They also - I will be direct here - have a history of handwaving bad behaviour, conflicts of interest, and recklessness.
When cliques take over something - businesses, technologies, politics - it means intellectual diversity leaves the room and important decisions get made, not due to practical reasons, but increasingly arcane wranglings within the clique itself
They're about as insular as the Unitarian church or Hacker News. It's basically an online community where anyone can check in, check out, and leave a comment or an essay. There's no formal structure or membership organization. The people who write or associate there could be edgy pre-teens or prominent math professors, it's really just a self-association thing. There are informal self-organized meetup groups in various cities, but not much different than groups who meet to discuss poetry or literature or video game speed-running. Some ideas have bubbled around more than others, like any memetic spread, but I don't think it's accurate to say that the people who associate there all agree on things, just like HN does not either. And nor is it any more of a clique than HN, or Twitter for that matter, even though you'll find some people on Twitter are more prominent and more vocal than others.
As with Hacker News, the existence of a web forum that anyone can create an account on does not imply the lack of a socially and geographically centralized ruling elite.
Who are the rich people you associate with the rationalists?
The main influential people I think of in that crowd who steer the conversations are Eliezer Yudkowsky and Scott Alexander. They're both doing fine financially at this point, I think, but not "buy politicians and laws like Elon Musk" fine.
There are some very rich people who might be loosely associated, like Dario Amodei (maybe?) or perhaps some VCs, but I'm not sure anyone really thinks of them as being a major influence among rationalists, more like people who hopped on the bandwagon. Certainly not ruling it.
I'm not denying that there's a shadowy ruling elite cabal of influential billionaires in the US, but if any of them are members of the rationalist community, they're certainly not influential within it. Maybe Elon lurks on lesswrong and posts stuff under a pseudonym or something, it's certainly possible, but doing that doesn't make someone a ruler of the group.
People in this comments page who are defending the crazy rationalist sects can be safely treated as though they’re arguing in bad faith. It matters little whether they are, or if they’ve ODed on their manbaby kool-aid and truly believe their nonsense; they’re just here to waste your time.
I have been prototyping some network proxies in a largely "vibe coded" fashion and it has been a mixed experience.
It has definitely accelerated my learning: through the process of writing rigorous plans, I have learned so much about network programming... the intricacies of HTTP2, how to design a fast MITM proxy, performance pitfalls in SSL...
These are things I studiously avoided learning for a decade, now demystified, mostly through Claude patiently rendering many figures and diagrams.
And with Fable, I was able to ship a working Envoy Rust extension in a one-shot.
On the other hand, my grasp on the details is tenuous. Every so often the agent can't progress and I am stuck for ideas, hitting different prompts like they were slot machines. I forget how to solve problems by myself.
I can feel myself becoming supine and dependent on something I know is going to become more expensive, a dependency AI vendors will seek to exploit. It has happened quickly. I do not really consent; it is forced on me by my employer.
One thing I may try this week is typing in all the code myself. With the level of back and forth that I've been happy with so far, Claude Pro seems to only be able to produce about 1000 lines of code a day in two or three five-hour sessions. I can totally type 1000 lines of code in a couple of hours if no problem-solving is needed. So maybe I'll look at Claude's code, switch screens to my editor, and type until I don't know what to type, and repeat.
Obviously there are higher-level design issues that I might not notice while engaging with the code at the byte-by-byte level, but I won't have the embarrassing problem I had a couple of weeks ago where duck.ai wrote me a CPU in Verilog, and after I tested it, I tried to write something in Verilog myself and couldn't even figure out how to write a syntactically correct XOR-gate module. (Verilator's parse errors are not designed as a Verilog tutorial, it turns out.)
This hasn't worked out that well for me. I have to try to do it myself, do something wrong, and ask for an explanation of what i broke. Just typing doesn't leave me with any retention.
So on reading this comment I was like, "oh, I see, Arby's, like RB, roast beef?" Except on looking it up, that's not the explanation! "Arby's" does come from the initials "RB"... but it doesn't stand for "roast beef", it stands for "Raffel brothers"! Rather less obvious.
>Friends that worked their described the "beef" as being a weird loaf of pressurized mewt-like protein before its sliced
It's just deli meat. Arby's is extremely open that their roast beef is deli meat roast beef. It's no different from what you find at the deli counter in your local krogers.
Have you or your friend never seen deli meat before?
A fun fact about another well known company - Foxconn. Apparently the founder Terry Gou came up with this name by joining words "fox" and "conn". Fox is an animal he liked and "conn" refers to connectors (which is what the company specialized in in its early days).
Not really explaining autoMATTic. Amazon, "A" is because Jeff wanted it at the top of search. Fox, Dell, Walmart, Disney, all is closer to the example.
I was just thinking about the A thing the other day.
A1 Plumbing, Acme Brick, AAA Home Servicing all the companies named over the years to try and be the first in the phone book.
But phone books have been dead for a long time. And search results aren’t alphabetical. It would be interesting for someone to graph or somehow otherwise show how names have changed in response.
I have seen those occasional pictures of businesses named “(thing) near me” in an attempt to win at Google searches.
Another brother/brother business rivalry, although not involving founders, was Sears and Montgomery Ward from 1985-1990. In 1985 Bernard Brennan become CEO of Montgomery Ward and in that same year his older brother Edward Brennan become CEO of Sears.
Chicago-based Sears was the largest US retailer at the time, and Chicago-based Montgomery Ward was the 5th largest.
> Broadly, the rationalists seem to have been pretty early to realizing LLMs were a big deal
You can't make that assertion when these same people made the LLM revolution happen, by securing the capital and human resources to realise their dream / nightmare
The people who made the LLM revolution happen were by no means exclusively rationalists--but more importantly, lots of people have lots of dreams about the future and even when pursued very, very few of those dreams pan out in anything like this way. LLMs are not what they are because of rationalists' sheer force of will.
You can have billions in nominal units but it is inflated to worthlessness when resources or labour disappear
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