I see their repo is open source. Is there any actual evidence that the sketchy machine generated any part of it?

But what does that have to do with consumer privacy?

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gotcha. thanks!

VS Code also has AI features. Would you be telling people to not use other suites if they were being developed in VS Code? Why should they be forced to use an IDE that explicitly excludes AI?

That’s not the issue

It’s a massive pain to actually get your emails to be received if you use a random self hosted ip

It’s definitely badly communicated and suspicious, I just called out jumping to extreme conclusions based on a suspicion alone. There probably will be people who are gonna review the code and see how much of it is probably LLM generated, and then we will know. I still think that it’s pretty much impossible to vibe code something on that scale, but I haven’t seen their cursorrules either.

Absolutely, I do them daily, what about you?

I also use bitwarden (work), and it only does password management. It doesn’t do email and alias generation.

Yeah it’s not just for privacy, hence the port forwarding requirement.

AFAIK nothing has shown issues with the privacy of either email or VPN? At least not something that wasn’t caused by blatant idiot user error like the guy with his apple email as recovery email.

Unfortunately so is Visual Studio and VS Code, yet we don’t say anything made with them is ‘vibe coded’. The text, big and bold, right the top of the screen for VS Code is literally:

Some people like it for the ui and they recently announced the ability to turn off all ai features.

I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren’t planning on vibe coding.

Vibe coding means only looking at the results of running a program generated by an agentic LLM tool, not the program itself - and it often doesn’t work well even with current state-of-the-art models (because once the program no longer fits in the context size of the LLM, the tools often struggle).

But the more common way to use these tools is to solve smaller tasks than building the whole program, and having a human in the loop to review that the code makes sense (and fix any problems with the AI generated code).

I’d say it is probably far more likely they are using it in that more common way.

That said, I certainly agree with you that some of Proton’s practices are not privacy friendly. For example, I know that for their mail product, if you sign up with them, they scan all emails to see if they look like email verification emails, and block your account unless you link it to another non throw-away email. The CEO and company social media accounts also heaped praise on Trump (although they tried to walk that back and say it was a ‘misunderstanding’ later).

It will allow you to see if the AI has made any syntax or runtime errors. It does not tell you about any logic errors.

Logic errors are already the most dangerous kind of programming error, and using AI just makes them even harder to find.

Using AI will only help you with syntax (which any good IDE should already be able to do) and finding information faster than a search engine (but leaving out important context). AI is not useful for programming anything that will be made public.

Yeah, you get immediate feedback, vs a scenario where you have to manually check the “facts” it provides in order to ensure it’s not hallucinating. I’ve had Copilot straight up hallucinate functions on me and I knew that they were bullshit instantly.

I iterate with it a ton and feed it back errors it makes, or things like type mismatches. It fixes them instantly and understands the issue almost every single time.

That’s the trick. Iterate often and always give it new instructions if it does something stupid. Basically be as verbose as needed and give it tons of context, desired standards, pitfalls to avoid, whatever. It helps a ton.

I’ve had the greatest success with Claude. The company I work for basically let us all go wild with a few to trial, and Claude has been the best for all of us—even better than GitHub Copilot.

I pay for my own pro plan outside of work and use the VSCode plugin. I’d say read the quickstart guide and experiment with it. Start off with having it do smaller changes and don’t be afraid to be verbose. The more context, the better. Point it to existing files you want to follow the patterns of and model after; give it links to resources for best practices, etc. You can also use it in “plan mode” if you want to see its proposed approach before it starts editing.

I also recommend leaving it so that each change it makes requires your approval (it will do this by default and you can step through everything). That way you always have some control and if it does something dumb, you can stop it at that step and pivot with a different instruction. Alternatively, if you want to see it go ham and carry everything out without approval at each step, you can enable auto-accept.

Once you get into it, start looking into how to craft instruction files. You can have those at your disposal for things like writing tests, language-specific guidelines and practices, etc. That way you can make sure it uses those as a reference so you don’t have to give it the same instructions over and over with every prompt.

If you hate writing tests, I’ve had really good luck letting it handle that. I tend to use it more for the bulk tasks that suck. For things where I want more control, I work with it on a piecemeal basis in my project.