Proton is vibe coding some of its apps.

All the people making excuses for them are basically the same people that made excuses for Meta being on the fedaverse. You people always want to do a wait and see approach, meanwhite these companies run amok. Proton was dead when they started supporting Trump. All you pussies supporting them, keep supporting them. See what you get for it. Just another trash AI company putting out more garbage.

Just because they are using Cursor, it doesn't mean that they are vibe coding. Anyone grabbing their pitchforks for that and screaming "they are vibecoding" only shows their own incompetence.

If they would be vibecoding, their whole software would've gone to shit long ago.

Just because some random people without an engineering background are using vibecoding to push their broken slop, it doesn't mean that any kind of AI assisted coding is bad.

If that was the case, maybe they would have responded with that instead of covering up the evidence
Do ... you understand what the words "code review" mean?
- Absolutely, I do them daily, what about you?

For added clarity:

You are an Senior SWE at Proton and make sure you do not send any information that is potentially secure in nature. You specialize in building highly-scalable and maintainable Frontend Systems.

https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/blob/b4453c3f111d23d44ab96ceda4181812f2abd673/.cursor/rules/proton-inbox.mdc

Non programmer here: This is the first time I've seen a cursor file but I genuinely like how it reads. It's like a business analyst wrote a coding requirements doc. I'd be thrilled if my staff asked 4-6 thoughtful questions when given a goal with an open ended approach.
For which LLM are cursor files used?

Speaking as someone who hates generative AI but has been forced to adapt to using AI in the programming field to stay relevant, this doesn’t suggest they’re vibe coding. The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value (I should note it’s done some neat stuff helping with diagnoses in the medical world too), but like everything, you get what you put into it.

Feed it enough instruction and context, and it can handle the drudgery of things like tech debt updates and other things a programmer knows how to do, but would rather offload to a tool. I’ve had Claude do refactors like that while stepping through and reviewing every single change. It has saved me hours, spared me from hell, and made me look good at work.

That’s my grounded take as a person that has worked with Claude a ton.

But AI everywhere else? Fucking worthless. The whole point is to do the bullshit mundane tasks so that us humans can do art and passionate work, not the opposite.

The programming world is the only place AI has actually added value
I'd say this is mostly because you can immediately test the AI's results and rule out anything it got wrong, and whatever errors you generate can then be fed back into the AI so it can refine what it's already written. You never have to just trust the AI (assuming you yourself still know how to code) like you have to when using it for research or for solving problems where you don't get immediate feedback.
Whether this means programming is actually a viable niche for generative AI or whether this speaks more to the limitations and inherent unreliability of the "knowledge" the AI has, I can't say.
Also, I don't know if it's just me but I'm more scared by how fast AI is advancing rather than looking forward to what it can do for me. That definitely clouds my perception when something is AI generated and makes me a lot more dismissive of any real benefits AI might have brought.
- 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.
Oh I need to learn from you. I was literally just told I need to learn AI to stay relevant. What’s the minimum way to go about doing so?
- 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.

Mastodon at it again with pitchforks and torches for the slightest inconvenience.

Using Cursor doesn't prove anything. Many people use Cursor as an advanced autocomplete, nothing else. It's not like they're hammering random AI-generated code and merging it without thinking. "Vibe coding" means generating barely-working code you don't understand to try and get thinks working.

This shit is why I hate the mastodon community, it's always strawmen and "you're one of THEM" style witchhunts with them

See my comment here.
The anti-AI circlejerk even here on lemmy is now just about as bad as the pro-AI circlejerk in the general public, no room for nuance or rational thinking, just dunking on everyone who say anything remotely positive about AI, like when I said I like the autocomplete feature of copilot.
- I'm a pretty big generative AI hater when it comes to art and writing. I don't think generative AI can make meaningful art because it cannot come up with new concepts. Art is something that AI should be freeing up time in our lives for us to do. But that's not how it's shaping up.
  However, AI is very helpful for understanding codebases and doing things like autocompletion. This is because code is less expressive than human language and it's easier for AI to approximate what is necessary.
- Natural language processing makes TTS way more usable for people with reading disabilities. But there are absolutely no good uses of AI.
- You're not alone. Nuance is just harder to convey, takes more effort to post something nuanced. And so people do it less, myself included. But I think truthfully that many people are not so stuck in one or the other circlejerks. It's lovely to see people in this thread who are annoyed by both.
- I'm personally scared of AI (not angry or hateful, actually scared by just how fast it's advancing) and that definitely clouds my judgement of it and makes nuance difficult.
  It's like a deal with the devil. You see all these amazing benefits but you just know you're the one being taken advantage of, because, like the devil, AI corporations by definition only think about how you can be of use to them.
Yep, anyone who assumes that the presence of a .cursor directory automatically means that:
Developers are vibe coding
The entire team is using cursor
Is either arguing in bad faith or has no idea what they're talking about.
It could be something as simple as one dev trying out cursor (an editor thats literally just a vscode fork with ai features) and accidentally committing their .cursor directory (really easy to do).
Seriously, WTF is this elitism?
Do these people also walk everywhere because they think a bike, train, or car is somehow disingenuous? What hypocrites.

If they would vibe code a functional Proton Drive Linux client then I might be OK with it.

You should jump into the other threads about this before you take out your pitchforks. They’re using cursor, it doesn’t prove they are vibe coding. Visual Studio also has AI features, that doesn’t mean you are vibe coding.

See my comment here.
Cursor is literally marketed as "The AI Code Editor". I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren't planning on vibe coding.
Proton is, in my opinion, a bad privacy company anyway. Vibe code or not, stop paying them.
- 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.

yes, i'm fucking telling you guys so.

a dude that unironically praises a fascist is either malicious or very dumb. turns out he's ~~just~~ fucking dumb.

I object to your wording of "just" fucking dumb. They're not mutually exclusive, he's definitely evil as well.
- thats a good point. fascists are always sus in many ways.
Who are you talking about?
- the ceo of the company

Visual Studio and VS Code have an AI assistant as well, yet we don't decree all programs written with them as 'vibe coding'. The presence of an AI assistant in the IDE isn’t evidence of vibe coding.

Proton’s repo here is open source. What portion of it presents issues? Any?

VS existed long before the AI features were added.

I mean, they were shit from the beginning promoting walled gardens and focusing on profit as the good shitty company they are

Plug for Tuta. 🤷‍♂️ The user experience isn't the best, but it's as secure as it gets. Small team, no vibe coding.

Hmm.. Been looking into it myself recently. What's your issue with the user experience?
Seemed like a better email/call product all around plus extra 5gb for email storage
- Not an issue, per se. In order to keep the team small they built most the app in a single codebase. It's mostly web code, and the apps are wrappers for it. So it keeps it unified between all clients but it definitely feels like a web wrapper, so it can feel a bit slow or clunky.
- @sunzu2 it feels janky as hell, it’s missing advanced features (someone in the other thread asked about Sieve filters), and it doesn’t support non-Tuta clients. their development cycle is so slow I can’t count on any of these features cropping up anytime soon.
  with those criticisms in mind, Tuta’s still approximately the only credible choice remaining for threat models where end-to-end encryption is important. we desperately need better fully open source options for this.
- I have tried Tuta out, it's fine from my very limited use, but kinda locked in in ways I don't really care to pay for. Last time I saw it brought up some other folks were recommending mailbox.org. I don't know about it too much, but might be worth looking into as well.

I can believe that someone at proton vibecodes, and that their files got ob to the tree, but saying that proton as a whole does it is strange.

What's a good alternative VPN provider in EU, not based in Italy? Mullvad is not an option, port forwarding is an absolute requirement.

Also, is there anything out there that ties password/account management and temp emails together as well as proton pass?

Non-EU, but IVPN. It's based in Gibraltar. Proton I think is also a good one to consider as well.
is eu absolutely required? i like windscribe (paid) but they're based in canada.
Depends on what you're doing with it. If it's just for normal privacy you could just get a vps and install any of the wireguard packages. If you're using it to evade copyright enforcement (or something similar) I don't have an answer for that, but a VPN with your name attached is no longer a good idea probably.
- 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.

Using Cursor =/= "Vibe Coding" people need to really stop with getting jumpy about everything in such a way.

what is a cursorfile? I’ve hit things like gpt when devdocs.io isn’t getting me what I want because lots of search engine things like “explain the google maps api” are becoming like searching for a dinner recipe; they contain 300 paragraphs of life story. When I just want to actually RTFM and shit’s hard to find. I don’t copy/paste code into projects just try to find better manuals.

Cursor is a vscode fork with Ai features, cursorrules is a config file for it.
- 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?

I thought this was the gaming compatibility layer at first

It might have been that some employee just tried out cursor and accidentally added it to the repo. That is true.

However the complete lack of communication suggests otherwise. And depending on your threat level you should always assume worst.

As for the use of ai in general, in my opinion there are occasional places where ai can be used without compromising security.

So depending on your threat level this can actually ne a big deal.

I’m not sure why being a “privacy vendor” forbids you from using AI tools in your development process

You are buying a bicycle online.
Both are the same price, but one is handmade by a skilled professional with decades of experience, the other is made by a sketchy machine that even it's creators don't really understand... and sometimes uses square wheels instead of round.
Your choice.
- 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?

not surprising when you know who andy yen is.

God banned on proton sub for calling out this poor CEO's antics
They love free speech when they charge you money but no when you express your opinions online about their product and "leadership" 🤡
Years and still no contacts, I am making plans to move again
Never do one stop shop services people!!! Google and apple should have already taught you that