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Comment by Aurornis

1 day ago

Reddit vibecoded LLM posts are kind of fascinating for how homogenous they are. The number of vibe coded half-finished projects posted to common subreddits daily is crazy high.

It’s interesting how they all use LLMs to write their Reddit posts, too. Some of them could have drawn in some people if they took 5 minutes to type an announcement post in their own words, but they all have the same LLM style announcement post, too. I wonder if they’re conversing with the LLM and it told them to post it to Reddit for traction?

I find that often the developers of these apps don't speak English, but want to target an English-speaking audience. For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.

  • I think they simply just haven't figured out that the barrier to entry is so low, that no one really cares what their app can do, even if does something genuinely useful.

  • > For the marketing copy, they're using the LLM more to translate than to paraphrase, but the LLM ends up paraphrasing anyway.

    What do you see as the distinction between "translating" and "paraphrasing"? All translations are necessarily paraphrased.

    • While that’s true, translations often vary in terms of how faithful they are to the source vs how idiomatic they are in the target language. Take for example the French phrase “j’ai fait une nuit blanche”, which literally means “I did a white night”. Clearly that’s a bad translation. A more natural translation might be “I pulled an all-nighter”.

      Similarly, “j’ai un chat dans la gorge” probably translates best as “I’ve got a frog in my throat”, even though it’s a completely different animal, it’s an obvious mapping.

      Those are fairly simple because they have neat English translations, but what about for example “C’est pas tes oignons”, which literally means “these aren’t your onions”, but is really a way of telling someone it’s none of their business. You could translate it as “it’s none of your business”, or “keep your nose out” or “stay in your lane” or lots and lots of other versions, with varying levels of paraphrasing, which depend on context you can’t necessarily read purely from the words themselves.

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They are not exclusive to reddit. HN has also been full of vibe submissions of the same nature.

It's insane how most of the dev subreddits are filled with slop like this. I've thought the same thing - why can't they even spend 5 minutes to write their own post about their project?

  • Yeah, in the last 6 to 10 months /r/rust has become littered with this stuff. There's still some good discussion going on but now I have to sort through garbage. The signal to noise ratio is out of whack these days that I generally avoid platforms like Substack, Medium and so on too.