Comment by earcar
5 days ago
Author here.
Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client, and I use it every day, so every bug I find is fixed immediately. I also care about bugs and PRs from other people, as you can see the amount that have been closed on the repo. The only reason I would stop maintaining this is if Spotify kills it.
I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either. Human directed and LLM generated is fairer. It's been an intense 5 days with tons of design decisions and testing on 3 platforms. I think we need a new vocabulary to distinguish it from "author doesn't care". I do.
> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
It's vibe-coded. Get over it.
There is a lot of gray area between vibe coding and zero AI. Get over that too.
End of the day this person is solving a good problem and sharing the work. This is what we want.
Also: nagging about the specifics of the README's tone of voice, while the 600-1000MB RAM usage drops to 100-250MB seems a little childish to me.
It's still open source! Just like in the pre-AI era they are welcome to submit a PR and improve it in the way they like it. The main dev seems very open to accepting help.
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A new term I encountered is “human-stewarded”.
I like the direction, but stewarded feels just a little too awkward to type or say to catch on. Perhaps "guide coded"? But it will be really hard to dislodge vibe coded from being generally applied to this concept, I think, in part because it is a catchy little term.
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Just like that comment you typed is keyboarded or keypadded. Or did you voice it?
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> Yes, the code is generated. Yes, the docs are generated. I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
I find this kinda funny. Fix the obvious part, better not look at the code.
I would use the phrase "Responsible Use of Generative AI", from https://www.debian.org/vote/2026/vote_002#texte
I wouldn't.
> The Debian Project nevertheless expects that all contributions submitted to Debian, regardless of how and with which tools they were produced, satisfy the same standards of quality, correctness, maintainability, and legal compliance.
Slop text on the homepage does not scream "quality" to me.
The code is worse, somehow. Endless paragraphs of comments that say nothing: https://github.com/crmne/fastpotify/blob/d9aafbf8e0b0c4d2da3...
Uhm yeah, that is "literally what" territory.
Wtf? It’s putting its whole chain of thought in comment form, that’s insane.
No wonder people can’t get Claude to stop commenting if this is what it does unrestricted.
> I agree LLM copy is annoying and will rewrite them myself.
Remember when people used to care about making a good first impression?
That hasn’t existed in software generally for like 20 years, to be fair
Don’t worry. Folks are entirely too concerned about the distinction between human made and LLM made. In a short handful of years, it will be incredibly rare to find something an LLM hasn’t been involved with
Agree, everyone thought I was crazy in 2025 when I was preoccupied with this question about moral 'authorship' in the AI era, but I think the culture will catch up quite soon, whether it likes it or not
https://sjsebastian.substack.com/p/thinking-through-the-mach...
I have no doubt that in the future AI code will be superior to human code. But today is not that day, and these projects that have never yet had human eyes on them are mostly shoddy pieces of work.
The official client is very annoying.
I rewrite docs myself on my own projects because they read as very LLMish, there's an intermediate stage which feels slightly less bad where I ask it to remove most of the comments, especially LLM signposting ones and then "rewrite any remaining comments and docs in a dry ukgov/gds style" which makes things slighyly less worse.
I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.
> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client
But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.
Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.
> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.
You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.
This debate is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Having the idea and the skills to dictate a stable piece of software are all that matter.
There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.
Of course there's a point in it, don't be a boor.
Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.
I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.
But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.
And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.
The problem is not the emittance of code by a statistical black box.
It’s not even knowing how it works or even what it used to achieve the desired result.
You wrote it or not, that’s your code. You are the one responsible. The machine has no brain. Use yours.
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The construction manager can’t say they built a skyscraper? In that only for someone who personally laid every brick and ran every wire?
No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.
If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.
I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.
That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.
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But they know the plans, and knows people where all the wires are, etc.
With vibe coding you know nothing.
In the original sense of the word, vibe coding means neither reading nor caring about the code: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.
There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.
FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.
It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".
If I take a photo and then use GIMP to edit it, then did I take a photo or just direct my camera at something and then steer my computer to make changes to it? After all, it's not me drawing each pixel manually. It's vibe-photoed!
No. It's vibe-photoed when you use AI models which are trained on countless hours of actual human work. Otherwise you apply deterministic tools at your will and according to your skill level.
Shit take. You’re trying to play the bs semantics game and can’t even pull it off
>Author here.
Not author. LLM manager, technical producer (if we're borrowing game development language), advanced AI user; not author. Authors are those whose code was used to train LLM(s) you were using while producing this fine piece of software. I'm saying this having neither positive nor negative emotions. Just clarifying.
I agree that "author cares" and "author doesn't care" is a very important distinction.
But to me vibe coded is about reading/editing the code. If all your code modifications are by prompt, it is vibe coded by definition.
One thing I like about Spotify is the recommendations. I like to do what i call “beat digging” which is basically exploring the platform for new artists and tracks?
Does this still have that?
The fact than an app like this can be vibe-coded is actually mind-blowing. I'd love to see your prompt history here.
Oh no, that's closed source, lol
Should add a full page click through slop warning to each page on the site. Also give credit to the LLM that made it in the "Brought to you by" section at the bottom.
I'll pick a human-written monstrosity over any "lean" consloption out there any time of day.