The apps all look the same with a different color palette, and makes for an engaging AI post on LinkedIn. Now they are mostly abandoned, waiting for the subscription to expire... and their personal data to get exposed I guess
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/my-non-programmer-friends-built-app...
Although cynically, in 1996 Microsoft would probably tell you anything you wanted to hear if it got you using Internet Explorer.
The Personal Web Server is ideal for intranets, homes, schools, small business workgroups and anyone who wants to set up a personal Web server.
https://news.microsoft.com/source/1996/10/24/microsoft-annou...
Securing all that got very technical and nuanced with hundreds of complex scenarios and tools and protocols. Tech companies raced to produce services the mass public can use, hiring hordes of very smart, expensive and technical developers to develop and secure, and they still get it wrong frequently. While the FOSS community adopted the "get good or gtfo" approach as in [1].
The average person has no chance. That's why closed wall-gardened platforms like iOS and Android are winning.
You see this type of template response copy pasted basically under any post/comment of this kind.
I think at the end of the day we’ll be able to look back and see what/who fared better, based on actual data.
There's a lot of cool stuff being built, but also as a user, it's a scary time to be trying new things.
I get that we'll never ship a perfect release, but if you have to push fixes once a day it seems you've lost perspective.
Vibe coding slopiness is more acceptable now because we've lowered our standards
Companies don't take security seriously now (and predating vibe coding)
> Previously, you were able to have _some_ reasonable expectation of security in that trained engineers were the ones building these things
When was this? What world? Did I skip worldlines? Is this a new Universe?
The world I remember is that anybody could write a program and put it on the Internet. Is this not the world you remember?
Further, when those engineers were "trained" ... were there no data breaches before 2022?
Of course shortcuts were taken. They always were and always will be. But don't try to compare shipping software today to even just 3 years ago.
And I mean that as both "end user" software signals, and "library" signals for other devs.
I assume that set of signals will slowly be updated. If one of those ends up being "Any Use of AI At All" is still an open question, depending on if the promised hype actually ends up meeting capability as much as anything.
Having someone dump shitty wares onto the public is only democracy if you think being held unaccountable as democratic.
https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/blob/de2cc2b48f2c8bfa401608c...
I'm interested to hear how other people approach this.
I'm building a desktop app that has has authentication needs because we need to connect our internal agents and also allow the user to connect theirs. We pay for our agents, the user pays for theirs (or pays us to use ours etc.). These are, relatively speaking, VERY SIMPLE PROBLEMS, nevertheless agents are happy to consume and leak secrets, or break things in much stranger ways, like hooking the wrong agent up to the wrong auth which would have charged a user for our API calls. That seemed very unlikely to me until I saw it.
So far what has "worked" (made me feel less anxious, aside from the niggling worry that this is theater) is: 1. Having a really strong and correct understanding of our data flows. That's not about security per se so at least that I can be ok at it. This allows me to... 2. Be aggressive and paranoid about not doing it at all, if it can be helped. Where I actually handle authentication is as minimal as possible (one should have some reasonable way to prove that to yourself). Done right the space is small enough to reason about.
How do I do 1 & 2 while not knowing anything? Painfully and slowly and by reading. The web agents are good if you're honest about your level of knowledge and you ask for help in terms of sources to read. It's much more effective than googling. Ask, read what the agents say, press them for good recommendations for YOU to read, not anyone. Then go out and read those sources. Have I learned enough to supervise a frontier model? No. Absolutely not. Am I doing it anyway? Yes.
Actually sounds like a typical mistake a human developer would make. Forget a `!` or get confused for a second about whether you want true or false returned, and the logic flips.
The difference is a human is more likely to actually test the output of the change.