Certainly, with Opus 5 and GPT-6, modernizing or even completely rewriting self-contained, non-critical tools seems like a Friday afternoon job now. I wonder however how important this is, in the grand scheme of things. I use GrapheneOS and the bundled messaging app is serviceable. It isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.
We're definitely not churning out code with AI models. There's no vibe coding going on in GrapheneOS. We're carefully writing and reviewing code as we've always done. We now have additional tools to assist with it. The main way we're using AI models is for code review and helping to write a lot more tests than we used to. It's helping to improve our code quality, not reducing it. We're not trying to get things done substantially faster.
The code generated by even the bleeding edge publicly available frontier models is rarely good enough to meet our standards. AI models are creating a lot of additional work for us because of how many more security issues are being discovered in upstream projects. It's also helping us raise our standards for our own work by pointing it at that to get extremely pedantic criticism catching many things we would miss.
We've hired multiple experienced app developers who have spent months working on modernizing the Messaging app and carefully reviewing it. There's no vibe coding going on for our apps. Why not look at the actual process of porting Messaging to Compose and our code review for each incremental part of the process?
https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Messaging/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3...
I'm really glad to read this. Thanks for putting in the effort to make quality software, far too few people are willing to do that these days.
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They are using AI [1]. I don't think messaging app is non-critical though.
[1] https://github.com/GrapheneOS/Camera/tree/compose
Our port of Messaging to Compose was clearly not vibe coded as both the parent comment and yours are wrongly portraying it. Experienced developers have been working on overhauling the app for months with a lot of back and forth code review to get the pull requests into shape. We don't have a policy against using AI for assistance as long as the resulting code meets our high standards.
We definitely use frontier AI models with cybersecurity access unlocked for code review. Those often find problems we didn't catch via multiple rounds of human review. The output is filled with hallucinations and incorrect details but an experienced developer can sift through it, identify the real issues it uncovered and get those fixed.
How did my comment portray your port as you are vibecoding it? I just said that AI is being used.
It seems obvious to me that you guys would use it responsibly.
I appreciate all the hard work the Graphene team has done all these years with advancing alternative mobile OS and have been following them for years so I hope they don’t take this the wrong way -
The project would benefit from more polished, professional image/interactions with the community. I (personally) have a hard time trusting my data to a project that is constantly bickering (“no, we don’t vibecode, did you even look at the repo”) in public forums like this under the official letterhead account.
I’d love to see y’all discussing these types of technical details with individual, identifiable (even under fixed pseudonyms if you want) developers’ accounts, and leaving the official letterhead account to stick to posting marketing material.
Just my 2 cents.
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We've explained we're using a GrapheneOS project account due to libelous personal attacks, stalking and harassment towards our founder and other team members. Hacker News has many past threads filled with libelous personal attacks towards our team. We repeatedly asked for moderation intervention and it hasn't happened. We regularly had our replies in those threads flagged because it went against the bandwagon of hate towards us.
Your account is persistently engaging in inappropriate personal attacks towards our founder. It's inappropriate to keep dropping someone's personal name who has never participated with their name on this site even aside from the personal attacks.
You're seeking out threads with discussion about GrapheneOS to post misleading and inaccurate claims about it in order to troll. You previously set your profile bio to a hostile remark towards the GrapheneOS project and have now changed it to pretend to be a GrapheneOS supporter.
Flagging personal attacks, harassment content, trolling, AI slop, engagement bait, shady advertising for products and deliberate attempts to mislead people is an appropriate use of the feature from our perspective.
We've been reaching out to the Hacker News moderation team for a while to discuss the years of libelous personal attacks and harassment content posted on the site. They can reach out to us at contact@grapheneos.org where we can discuss that.
You don't deny the flagging operation. Thanks for confirming it
More world salad to distract. No sources.
I'll send you some proof that my device is running GrapheneOS btw. How would you like to arrange that?
Yes my support of the project is variable, highly influenced by how it is run and how the directors act on social media. The project does not have a right not to be criticised and that includes the people running it. It's the flip side of the coin of engaging in a public forum
"HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to" – it's not designed for corporate PR accounts. We all know it's you purely by your style of writing and persecution complex
I dunno. If they're using AI, it's well controlled. I don't see a lot of artifacts you usually get from full-on vibe-coding.
Our code quality standards are very high. Vibe coding is not capable of meeting those standards. The details of how things get written and improved to meet our standards is up to individual developers. We don't have a policy against developers using AI for assistance. They need to understand all of the code and it needs to pass our code review. Our code review is now usually a lot more thorough than before. In addition to human review, we regularly pass code through a couple frontier AI models and then review the results to figure out which claims it makes are valid. Even the frontier models hallucinate many non-existent problems and often get a lot of details wrong when they find real problems, but they do find a lot of real problems.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49592770