this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Proton is vibe coding some of its apps. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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TranscriptA post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying: courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957

It has a reply by the author saying: in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f

given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public

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[–] galoisghost@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Um, it’s a public repository. You can view the code that’s been added. Even if it IS AI generated, you can review it yourself.

I’m as anti-AI as anyone but this is misplaced AI-alarmism.

[–] oatscoop@midwest.social 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

can review it yourself.

You're a supervisor and you have 2 employees: Bill and Jim. As a supervisor your job is to ensure the work is being done correctly.

Bill is competent and rarely makes major mistakes. Jim does a decent job most of the time ... but he's also a savant at screwing up -- he regularly fucks up in ways that aren't immediately obvious but are guaranteed to cause serious problems days to weeks from the screw up.

You can glance over Bill's work and be fairly certain it's fine. You need to go over every single piece Jim's work to check for problems, and even then some are probably going to slip through.

AI is currently Jim, and Jim has no business writing code for anything privacy or security focused.

[–] grindemup@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a great example since AI isn't taking on the role of an independent software engineer here, so there is no "Jim" and this is much less of an issue than y'all are making it out to be. You know that auto-correct is also a form of ML right? Have you considered that tools can be used responsibly and that standards for software developers still apply even when they use new tools?

[–] petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 year ago

You know that auto-correct is also a form of ML right?

Yeah, and I don't fuckin use it.

Also, my auto-correct is saying that sentence is missing a comma, so I guess you don't either.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does anyone here actually review code?

[–] GissaMittJobb@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, and it's one of the most important things I do. Given the AI codegen boom we're seeing, it's also the skill I have that is increasing the fastest in value.

[–] CrazyHorse@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

Only my own code and so far most of it has been unacceptable.

[–] Geometrinen_Gepardi@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is this proof of vibecoding?

[–] officermike@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor that understands your codebase and helps you code faster through natural language. Just describe what you want to build or change and Cursor will generate the code for you.

https://docs.cursor.com/en/welcome

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’d bet they just added it to their global .gitignore where it should be, then removed it because they didn’t want their private dot files committed to a public repo.

I don’t think this user knows much about git works. I don’t think this is nefarious or “vibe coding” as it’s colloquially known to be. It’s a bit much to describe all LLM use blindly as vibe coding, when vibe coding usually means just blanket accepting AI content.

[–] docd@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Pretty on point, the .gitignore in the repo has a CLAUDE.md

https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/blob/main/.gitignore