Hey guys, Felix here. Some people asked me about my position on AI generated apps and where this project inserts on all of that.
I work as a software developer at a company that is very, very into AI. I have watched people I sat next to get let go and not replaced, because an AI licence costs less than a salary. Every time it happens I wonder when it's my turn. So that's where I'm writing this from.
Which isn't to say I hate the thing. I use it every day. It writes documentation in a language that isn't my native one. It comments a method so that someone who shows up in six months can actually help me. Copilot autocomplete finishes the boring block I've typed a thousand times already. It also drinks the ocean, which nobody likes to put on the slide but if everyone learns to use it more responsibly this topic would be lighter.
It still isn't an employee.
Vibe coding is when you describe what you want, paste back whatever the model hands you, and ship it without reading it. Which would be fine if it stayed a toy. But this is software people install on their own machine, pointed at folders they've been filling for years now. Mine can delete files. If I don't understand my own code, I'm gambling with someone else's Downloads folder.
It also makes the rest of us look replaceable, which is exactly the argument being used to walk my colleagues out of the building.
I drew this one by hand in draw.io for the post. Although this one is very very very very simple and lacking technical details (don't want to give you traumas), I don't do it nearly as often as I should and I won't pretend diagrams are part of my routine, but that's sort of the point. I'd love to watch someone who vibe coded their whole app open a blank canvas and draw their own architecture even in this simplified way, arrows and all, without screenshotting the folder tree and calling it a diagram.
Two bugs got reported on github recently. Both are closed now (hopefully for good, otherwise I'll be reopening them and eating my words).
The first one came from someone with 45,201 mods installed. Linux killed the app for eating too much memory, which also skips every mechanism that would have written a log, so there was nothing to read. The culprit was my own conflict detection. It compares packages by their internal resource keys and built a pair for every combination sharing one. Sims 2 creator tools stamp the same ids into every file they ever export, so that library came out at roughly two billion pairs (I know, crazy!), rebuilt from scratch on every single toggle (NASA computer over here). The tab lag on top of it was the filter chips recounting all 45,201 mods on every repaint, about 478ms a frame. (That number is off my own machine with a fake 45k folder built to match. I never got to see theirs.)
The second one was a Mac on macOS 10.15 where the app died before a single line of my code ran. I asked the reporter to launch the binary from the terminal, because the one error line that mattered never makes it into Apple's crash report. It said the isolate snapshot was invalid. Flutter changed how it packages compiled code in 3.44 and the new format isn't readable on Catalina or Big Sur. Not my bug. It's flutter/flutter#189183, still open upstream, so I pinned my release builds to an older Flutter and shipped.
Ask a model to fix "app crashes with many mods" and you'll get a try/catch around the symptom and a paragraph telling you it's solved. Neither of those was ever going to come out that way.
There's no GetX in this project. No state package at all, just one ChangeNotifier and ListenableBuilder doing the work. I like GetX. Four years of Flutter every single day since 2022 and I still reach for it on small things. But I'm not building something I want to maintain for years on a package the community is quietly walking away from. That's a judgement call about trust and momentum, and a model that has read every GetX tutorial ever written will cheerfully tell you it's fine.
I'm also doing my masters in CS right now, and it's noticeable how much responsible AI use has crept into subjects that have nothing to do with AI. That's the right instinct. Nobody is telling students not to use it. They're being taught to be accountable for what comes out.
This whole thing is a love project anyway. The Sims 2 was my first computer game and the one I properly fell for, the best one in the franchise, and I won't be taking questions on that. I had the four-disc Deluxe pack and I treated those discs like treasure. Anyway. You don't hand something like that to an autocomplete and hope.
And none of this protects me, by the way. Knowing my own code line by line either made by me or assisted with AI hasn't made anybody at work harder to replace. That's the part I don't have an answer for, so I'm not going to pretend the post has one.
So use the tool. Let it write your docs, let it finish your boring blocks and basic modules. Then read every line it gives you like it came from a stranger, because it did.
And study, for god's sake. Even if you don't enjoy coding, be good enough to review it, test it, and know when the machine is lying to you with total confidence.
