Vibe code was never meant to be reviewed.
These rewrites are just test-driven development taken to the absolute extreme. Created under the hope that the existing tests are exhaustive and cover every relevant use case, such that if they all pass, the rewrite must be at least as good as the original. So just go with the vibes and burn tokens until they pass, and your job is done.
In practice, this is never true for any codebase above a certain level of complexity, especially not one as mature and widely used as Postgres. But reality doesn't seem to be an obstacle for vibe coders.
The challenge is that more and more people are producing project like this - 1,000s of commits and > 200k lines of code - and saying it was carefully created using agent based workflows and not vibe coded.
In that case they need to document the process and workflow, and demonstrate the care that was taken.
Quite amusing we have decades of human written code much of it sub standard and yet no one demanded proof till now of Open Source projects having to ‘demonstrate’ anything.
If ya don’t wanna use it, don’t. Simple.
I get what you’re saying and agree with the last sentence. Just wanted to touch on the “why” part.
In the world of exclusively human written software the existence of the artefact itself (code, documentation) served as the proof that there’s someone with half a brain behind it. Now that’s not the case anymore.
The conclusion stays though - it’s OSS, authors/maintainers have no obligation to anyone to do anything. Like it, use it, don’t like it, don’t use it.
As for me, I’ve found that the community and activity proxies are still good.
> As for me, I’ve found that the community and activity proxies are still good.
Definitely still something to look into. A project I'm checking in on from time to time is https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash/.
It will be interesting to see how the project activity is unfolds? Are people using it in production. How many errors do they find. What do those fixes entail. What happens with the docs over time. Etc.
I haven't had a change to look in depth, but based on a quick glance I'd say that the activity on the project seems like the tempo you'd expect of a similar open source project.
Maybe the principal maintainer can be trusted, but pull requests could do with some of that evidence.
spec-driven development is pretty good at this
> The challenge is that
Why is that a challenge? As long as they are open about this, all is OK.
> reality doesn't seem to be an obstacle for vibe
Went straight into my vault of brilliant quotes!
One of the projects Im working on and off is a tamper-proof audit log, based on some PoC code I created almost 10 years go; unit and integration testing are good at preventing defects and regressions, but they will not guarantee your software will work. However, with the power of LLMs, one can easily use model checking (in my case with Quint) and/or other formal proof approaches to ensure the software conforms as specified. The result (in my opinion) is an implementation guided by a single human that is actually more trustworthy than manual human-made software using the traditional approach.
> Vibe code was never meant to be reviewed.
It was also never meant to hit production.
And run them in test setups to try to find bugs.
If you find some, fix them.