Topic: "vibe coding" an illegal clone until it's done or amazon tells me to stop being a freeloader

+vocalon — 1 month ago #68,189

i am on a real kick for doing web development work, so my side project for web development is... more web development.

a couple days ago, amazon recently launched its own AI-assisted code editor, kiro. it's literally just VScode but with claude code built in, and a bunch of agentic/MCP stuff that will manipulate files for me. it's got a free period where it's got something like 500 interactions/day for free, until they decide for this to not be the case. could be any day, i have no idea how long that plans to run.

the thing that caught my eye about kiro is that as well as doing your typical chatbot, it offers a feature where you can lay down a development plan for your chatbot to follow more strictly. you'll write in an idea, and it'll generate, in order:
- a base requirements list
- a design document
- a list of tasks to complete

and then it will go rush off to complete them. i actually really like this, i tried "vibe coding" a game in pyxel a couple weeks ago, and it was not great - i really don't care for the back and forth where you have a single idea, and the bot does it, then another, and the bot does it. bulk-writing down tasks treats my brain a lot better and it seems like the AI bot is also pretty good at handling it.

i spent my mid-teens doing this shit, time to spend my late 20s doing it.

my restrictions are:
- no original code of my own will be written
- editing of ai-generated code will be limited to just reordering existing code, mouse only
- there is a single copy of the AnT malaise-blue stylesheet to refer to when it comes to styling
- i go until amazon kiro has a pricing plan or i decide that's enough

along with that, my stack choices are:
- react + nextjs
- payload backend

mostly because it's what i'm using at work, and though i've really been eyeing go + templ + htmx, learning a new language like go through vibe coding seems like a recipe for a bad time.

that said, i already burnt through today's credits. so let's get right into that.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 4 minutes later[T] [B] #675,706

the first choice it made for me was this. you're directly confronted with the unique ID mechanics of the site, it actually generates a restore ID passphrase immediately upon visiting the site, rather than storing your UID and password like ATBBS + co do. i think that's pretty cool.

it looks crazy generic, also. holy shit do i hate the way the modern web looks. i hate white-on-white only delineated by blurred box-shadows it all just looks so fucking generic and soulless. even after telling the bot to stop doing that, it still does it sometimes. not a fan.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 5 minutes later, 9 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,707

speaking of modern web shit i truly fucking despise. check out this hero element i did not ask for but have not yet asked to be removed. i think if you look at this codebase you will find it is *extremely not encrypted*. what an insane and bold-faced lie to put on the front page. AI truly is the future.

another funny story here. where you can see the standard misery-blue background and the lighter background for posts in the header is where i had asked for the header to closer resemble what was laid out in the CSS, which took it from vaguely generic, bootstrap-y design to the shitlist-blue we all know and feel nothing about. it used the proper header color, and then i asked for it to remove the background color, since it was using that lighter post-blue as well as the header-blue. and it did not remove the post-blue. but it did remove the header-blue. and i just rolled my eyes and moved on. but man. it's funny.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 7 minutes later, 17 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,708

let's just look at the threads though. these are mostly keysmashes because i simply didn't think to ask for it to seed the database* with anything interesting. you'll note that every topic is by Anonymous A. this is because the creator of every thread is Anonymous A, obviously**, but the board is forced anon for now, until i decide it's not, so every OP is always Anon A. there are no namefags allowed. it also displays recent activity twice - once with the date in its own column, and once hanging on by a little thread in the namefag column.

the topics list is rendered client-side, so that selector on the right actually just fetches entirely new data like it's the modern era. i fucking hate this. i grew up with server-side rendering and the brainrotted zoomers don't know just how good SSR really is. and you may look at that selector and the links in the header, and think "wow, so the links to view both popular posts and recent bumps must work, right?" and the answer is of course no.

i actually quite like the topic preview beneath the topic headline, it makes everything feel just a little bit more alive, IMO, and less like it's just displaying raw data from an SQL query.

* the database is SQLite, also. i love SQLite so much.
** stay tuned

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 4 minutes later, 22 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,709

a forum is nothing without its replies, though, so let's look at those.

it's intelligent and high-brow as always and definitely not just me writing whatever came to mind.

it kind of looks like shit, but it works. but wait, what's that. i just spent so many words saying "OP of a thread is always Anon A" but uh. you'll find here that it's actually not Anon A. it's anon B. anon A is the first reply. this is because for some reason, the method to map posters to letters *alphabetically sorts them* before assigning letters. this is, according to the unit tests it also wrote: a feature, not a bug.

what the fuck on earth. it also took 5 or 6 tries to properly hook up replies so that bumps and reply counts were incremented when a new reply gets made. a lot of my credits were burned on fixing shit it would tell me was fixed, when it clearly was not fixed. super cool!

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 3 minutes later, 26 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,710

let's make a post of our own now.

you'll note a couple things:
- it's really fucking funny that the headline box is scrunched to be super tiny.
- the posting guidelines and formatting tips being on either side of the post button is really funny. just total failure to group content properly.
- the actual text boxes also have no formatting and just blend all the way into the body of the page

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 4 minutes later, 30 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,711

that's all the posting i have to do at the moment, so let's go click that manage identity button, drop our ID, and get on with it.

(it closes instantly. it provides no functionality. epic.)

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 5 minutes later, 36 minutes after the original post[T] [B] #675,712

all in all, this was about 4 hours of non-stop claude running and my guiding it. my major technical hurdles thus far have been:
- sometimes, the agent will just sometimes fail to make an edit to a file. this corrupts the file and its solution will often to be to rewrite the file from scratch, rather than revert it to before its corrupted state, something i know it stores. this works for me because i simply don't give a fuck but this is pretty bad for doing real work.
- sometimes, like described with the header bar, the context of words doesn't give it adequate guidance and it will do something stupid.
- the third is that a lot of the web and the available open-source code on the web looks like utter fucking dogshit. that hero section it generated for me is such a waste of fucking space to tell me *nothing*. i can't imagine being someone who opens a website and sees 144pt font saying some asinine marketing spin and thinks "FUCK YES RIGHT AWAY SIR" but i know that's what the job is so i guess, like, whatever.

+Anonymous B — 1 month ago, 1 hour later, 2 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,716

That is ugly

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 24 minutes later, 2 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,717

@previous (B)
yeah it looks like total shit. i'm hoping by the time amazon kicks me off it's less shit. but if it's not, eh. who give a fuck.

+FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 1 month ago, 12 hours later, 14 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,724

@675,709 (vocalon)
> this is because for some reason, the method to map posters to letters *alphabetically sorts them* before assigning letters. this is, according to the unit tests it also wrote: a feature, not a bug.
sorting by their UID? maybe try telling it to explicitly sort them by timestamp before assigning a letter

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 14 minutes later, 14 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,725

@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
yeah, it alphabetically sorted UIDs, so anon_ad394c would be listed before anon_b230fg even if anon_b was the OP. it's a strange choice to make out of the box, but it's superior to before, where it would just show your UID directly.

this is the first thing i asked it to do today and it worked pretty simply, but in the process, it deleted the more atomic components i had asked it to generate before running out of daily credits, since i suspect its tendency to make big 1200 line files instead of favoring smaller, composable pieces was making it run worse. so like. LOL.

(Edited 3 minutes later.)

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 16 minutes later, 15 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,726

today's plans:
- server-side render everything i can
- fix the stupid restore ID-equivalence menu
- fix the payload admin panel stuff

payload's admin panel is really really good. it's like, wordpress or strapi but it exposes an API and has its own database abstraction that i find quite nice (that i don't even need to display a credit link for)

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 51 minutes later, 15 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,727

it's really fucking struggling with tests.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 45 seconds later, 15 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,728

like, really really struggling.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 12 minutes later, 16 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,729

approaching the third attempt at writing tests. each attempt is characterized by it failing a bunch of tests that produce a ton of output, it failing to diagnose why the tests are failing, and then asking me to summarize and move to a new session. this shit's so ass.

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 1 month ago, 9 minutes later, 16 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,730

@675,726 (vocalon)
> (that i don't even need to display a credit link for)
looooool

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 2 hours later, 18 hours after the original post[T] [B] #675,732

it burned through all the credits for the day not knowing how to use vitest. that's really funny. the only thing it successfully got done was move the individual topic view page to server-side rendering. lmao, lol.

(Edited 4 minutes later.)

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 1 day later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,754

no posts from yesterday, i burned through the credits on something else. but it did eat shit quite badly. just the pinnacle of trash generated code.

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 1 month ago, 4 hours later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,757

@previous (vocalon)
Is that... supposed to be CSS?

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 4 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,758

@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
it's supposed to be tailwind and htmx-boosted html, yeah. i have no idea where the actual CSS is coming from, tailwind sort of side-steps that whole part of the process. it took about 15 minutes to generate, and it held everything up until it output it all, realized it was bad, and walked it back. s'no good.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 6 hours later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,759

this round, i've had to restart the single task i wanted to do 4 times because claude was experiencing high traffic at 5 AM.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 8 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,760

for the record, if you take a long time on a task, it can get to be 75%, 80% done and then if the model is too overloaded, you will have to start over. this is surely not going to have any detriments to the code it is already struggling with, and the solution is kind of seeming like it will just be "tell it to stop writing tests" which sucks for its own reasons. this will surely not have any detriments on projects which are entirely vibe-coded, which definitely exist.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 37 minutes later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,761

something interesting it tries to do quite frequently is use multiple terminals in chat but only use one in the editor, which results in it attempting to do things as if there's a free terminal when there's not.

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 1 month ago, 3 hours later, 2 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,762

@675,758 (vocalon)
yeah that's... I guess you could call this the monkey at the keyboard and it just happened to type some sequences that kinda-sorta resemble html-like and css-like structures

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 21 hours later, 3 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,774

aw, the image server seems fucked at the moment. so here's a smaller, image-less update.

one: since claude 4.0 is constantly experiencing heavy traffic and the constant resets suck horribly, so i backed up to claude 3.7, which will occasionally just leave stray words at the end of actions. very funny to give it a command like "hey, update this specific part of the page. it hasn't successfully done so yet" and get it to spit back just the words "avoiding facebook". like. me too bud.

two: i fed it the rendered HTML for this thread as a basis for styling individual threads, and it just doesn't seem to know what the fuck to do about that.
so now there are two competing thread display components.

https://imgur.com/a/gxsCAZw

+Anonymous D — 1 month ago, 8 hours later, 4 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,779

Maybe I’ll copy you and try to use ChatGPT to make a clone that is 100% JavaScript frontend and 1 giant chunked data ledger.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 7 hours later, 4 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,784

@previous (D)
wouldn't be too far from the unholy abomination i'm building, tbh. this code is fucking gnarly. wrappers and containers as far as the eye can see.

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 1 month ago, 10 hours later, 4 days after the original post[T] [B] #675,788

@previous (vocalon)
somebody forgot to teach AI K.I.S.S. principles

+Anonymous E — 1 month ago, 2 days later, 1 week after the original post[T] [B] #675,808

Update?

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 1 day later, 1 week after the original post[T] [B] #675,816

@previous (E)
some work stuff really ramped up for me and it demands full-time attention, i'll be getting back on it soon though.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 month ago, 3 hours later, 1 week after the original post[T] [B] #675,818

seeing what other people are saying about kiro and having a ball as people put to words what i've been thinking. kiro does really get lost in the tests, like it's trying to maximize what it's doing with no regard for whether it should be doing it or not.

(Edited 38 seconds later.)

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 2 weeks later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #675,999

getting back to this with the most important vibe coding time saver ever when it comes to keeping things hands off

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 8 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,015

taking a step away from this one for a moment since AI doesn't deal well with fuck-huge codebases, and instead starting something from the ground up.

... it's already circling the drain of failing to maintain tests. lmao.

+Anonymous F — 3 weeks ago, 2 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,016

@previous (vocalon)
let down

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,017

@previous (F)
yeah.

shocking nobody, AI integration is still, charitably, leaving something to be desired. overall i think my impression of vibe coding as a thing that can be done is that it will probably be really good in 5-6 years but is not much more than a novelty now. it produces things which do, technically work, but a lot like every junior developer, makes a lot of baffling choices, especially when it loses scope of itself. the steering docs that come with kiro and are used heavily in vibe coding now are a good step, but some of that is just that memory is not great in these things.

right now, the illegal clone has three different "new topic" buttons on the front page, and only one works. there's a history page i managed to pull out of 500 internal server error hell. there's a watchlist page that has no button that lets things get added to the watchlist.

this mockup for a VN engine's tests are passing, at least, but that's only because it's mocking the entirety of the phaser library for tests and has no relationship to the actual code, and i ran out of credits to change that. its tendency to circle the drain on tests would be *really expensive*, if i had to pay for it.

·Anonymous F — 3 weeks ago, 4 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,018

@previous (vocalon)
your just a lazy cunt. you could recreate something basic like this and throw it up but instead here u are making excuses and posts for attention about it. u suck

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 5 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,032

@previous (F)
oh dogg i could absolutely do that. but my interest isn't in making an illegal clone for its own sake, i could do that easy. i've known how to do that for 15 years. every other week in 2011 i was putting up some bullshit .tk domain with my bullshit ATBBS forks running on it. my interest is in vibe coding and its capacity to do it.

(Edited 4 minutes later.)

+Anonymous G — 3 weeks ago, 7 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,040

Vibe coding isn’t real.

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,047

@previous (G)
i mean it is definitively real it's just not that good.

+Gavin — 3 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,048

waterfall OOP for the ai world
grandpa laughs again

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 3 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,052

@676,018 (F)
lmao I participated in this
https://web.archive.org/web/20081222030253/http://www.anontalk.fr/?view=1237

·Anonymous F — 3 weeks ago, 4 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,055

@previous (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
no one making clones anymore, TC/MC aren't even anonymous text boards since VPNs and proxies are blocked. OP not trying to publish shit either just whine on like a fag

·FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI — 3 weeks ago, 7 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,067

@previous (F)
Allowing vpns and proxies for user-generated content sites with no account registration isn't feasible anyway unless you've got a team of 20+ hardened oldfags monitoring uploads round-the-clock, making sure nobody is posting cp.

+Anonymous I — 3 weeks ago, 34 minutes later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,069

@676,055 (F)
There is a new clone of mc. Alas they picked Matt to be a mod and the place is totally spammed by the now banned Chinese girl teen - Loaded with her fetish of baby diapers.

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 8 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,072

@676,055 (F)
https://sourceforge.net/u/vocalon/profile/

these are not good projects, i was 14-15. but like, cmon now.

·Anonymous F — 3 weeks ago, 5 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,074

@676,067 (FuckAlms !vX8K53rFBI)
no file uploads or URLs for new users, problem solved. blocking proxies won't stop someone with a botnet from flooding CP, this is a thinly veiled excuse. took Kimmo's idea of an anonymous text board and turned it into a non-anonymous image board

·vocalon (OP) — 3 weeks ago, 15 hours later, 3 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,080

@previous (F)
kimmo's idea also resulted in a board that died in about 1/8th the time tinychan's been around.

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 1 day later, 4 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,130

https://kiro.dev/pricing/

rifp.

·Anonymous F — 2 weeks ago, 4 hours later, 4 weeks after the original post[T] [B] #676,131

@previous (vocalon)
I could make a basic text board with chatgpt using the amount of time you've spent whining on this thread your a lazy bastard ok

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 3 days later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,163

@previous (F)
yeah you probably could. i'm not your boss. go make chatgptBBS

·Anonymous F — 2 weeks ago, 9 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,164

@previous (vocalon)
spent more time posting screenshots than actually making something viable this thread was a quest for attention from the start u suck

+Anonymous J — 2 weeks ago, 15 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,165

+Anonymous K — 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,166

@676,131 (F)
2 dumb 2 understand the point of the exercise
🏃♂️

·Anonymous F — 2 weeks ago, 28 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,167

@previous (K)

·Anonymous H — 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,169

@previous (F)
>

u got a thin brain stem
don’t stand in the wind it might snap

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 17 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,182

@676,165 (J)
this image is older than i was when it was made now.

·Anonymous B — 2 weeks ago, 1 day later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,200

@previous (vocalon)
it's pretty good tho

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 11 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,208

@previous (B)
it is pretty good. i used to really hate it for the obvious reasons but like, it's a good capture of me crashing out over a relationship as a teenager for, no joke, the first time. and on a more personal level, i don't have a ton of images of myself from this time in my life because it's around the time gender dysphoria set in, and i stopped wanting to be in photos for obvious reasons. i'm so fond of it. hang it in the louvre.

·Anonymous Z-2 — 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,209

@previous (vocalon)
So, you role play another type of gender.

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 3 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,212

@previous (Anonymous Z-2)
we're all roleplaying gender, bud.

+Anonymous L — 2 weeks ago, 1 hour later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,213

I would've never thought I'd see this name again in a thousand years. How've you been?

·vocalon (OP) — 2 weeks ago, 14 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,216

@previous (L)
pretty good! got married, got a pretty nice living situation, getting a lot of opportunities to do work i love for projects i love. extremely difficult to complain.

·anon — 2 weeks ago, 3 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,217

@previous (vocalon)
Married? Curious because well just curious. Regular as in standard or different re genders?

·Anonymous B — 2 weeks ago, 43 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,218

@previous (anon)
Wouldn't you like to know, creepy old man.

·vocalon (OP) — 1 week ago, 1 day later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,227

@676,217 (anon)
same gender. i got lesbian married.

·Anonymous I — 1 week ago, 8 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,228

@previous (vocalon)
Where you born a female or transitioned from male?

·vocalon (OP) — 1 week ago, 9 hours later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,233

@previous (I)
you can look at my teenage face if you scroll up.

·Anonymous I — 1 week ago, 1 hour later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,234

@previous (vocalon)
OK well hummmm So you're you just joking about lesbian married.

Oh and my past try at C++ With AI and poor results as judged by a quality coding team -
Tried the trial version we were giving of GPT-5 and results were shocking close to the formal code written for a key Satellite System section.
Station Keeping witch is of course a very critical function. Has to control Gyro's and fuel for minor rocket igniting where time and fuel is a matter of LIFE and Death.

Team said close but not close enough to use what the Bot provided. Maybe the next version.

(Edited 6 minutes later.)

·Anonymous J — 1 week ago, 31 minutes later, 1 month after the original post[T] [B] #676,236

@previous (I)

TinyChan