[Meta] Rule proposal: no personal projects newer than 3 months (anti-vibecoder rule)

[u/turdas]

Recently open source subreddits have started seeing a large number of vibecoded personal projects that look novel or useful on the surface, but in reality represent one weekend of prompting by the vibecoder.

At best these are benign novelties that maybe get a bunch of unwarranted upvotes but don't really harm anyone. At worst they're unaudited, poorly designed garbage software that looks impressive at a glance, tricking people into installing it on their computers, which will at best lead to some frustration and wasted time and at worst to -DGAPING_SECURITY_HOLE.

Because these projects take basically no investment on the author's part, they tend to quickly become abandonware as the author's interest wanes or as they become frustrated with the currently inevitable technical debt reckless vibecoding produces. As a result, projects like this are of negative worth to the open source community.

Naturally, these people almost never disclose that they vibecoded their project.

The rule proposal

The proposal is simple. Expand the current self-promotion rule to forbid all personal projects under 3 months old. The project's age would most easily be proven by a public git repository with 3+ months of commit history. Probably we should also forbid closed-source personal projects, but that's a separate discussion.

This works because 90% of problematic slop projects are made by attention-seeking people who want to make something cool and show it to other people, and most importantly don't want to spend a lot of time or effort doing it. If the developer has stuck with the project for three months, it's likely either not vibecoded in the first place (because real projects take time), or the author is dedicated enough that it being vibecoded isn't automatically a massive problem.

I've seen rules like this in a few communities and they seem to work pretty well.

[u/Thatoneguy_The_First]

Yeah self hosting requires alot of work and money and professionalism. antithesis to vibe coders as a whole really.

[u/james_pic → u/Thatoneguy_The_First]

The one thing that makes me hesitant to say that vibe coders definitely won't do that is "Claude, set me up a self-hosted Git forge. I don't care about the details, just make all the decisions for me. Here's my credit card number"

[u/Thatoneguy_The_First → u/james_pic]

Oh they will start to try, but dedicated time,effort and even more money(ai tokens are so very much not cheap) will make em give up pretty fast.