You call them steamed despite the fact they're obviously grilled.

Well, I'm from Utica and I've never heard anyone use the phrase 'steamed hams'.

I wonder what Armin Tanzarian has to say about this whole situation. 🤔

No analogy is ever perfect, of course. That's the point of an analogy, it's not the actual thing.

In the case of vibe-coded apps, I think the thing that still matches up with "home cooked meal" is the fact that the app can be whatever you want it to be.

For example, I've got a big pile of music files I've accumulated over time from a couple of different sources with a couple of different styles of metadata, piled together in an ad-hoc assortment of folders. It's an arrangement entirely unique to me. I had a coding AI create tools specifically to handle this pile, cleaning it up and organizing it, and had it build a website out of them that looked and behaved exactly how I wanted it to. It's not the fanciest thing and the code could always use some refinement but it suits my needs perfectly. I'm not going to publish it because nobody else would find it useful, if they had a similar sort of situation to deal with they would be best served by having a coding AI whip up their own unique tool themselves.

The food analogy there is looking in your cupboard to see what ingredients you've got, thinking about what sort of food you're in the mood for, and then throwing together something that fits those parameters.

You could have just used Dropped Needle

No I couldn't've. I just had a look and that application has nothing to do with what I was doing.

All of the music in those folders was generated by me, some of it from a variety of different online services that are now defunct (Udio and Riffusion) and some of it from local music models. None of it is published anywhere, much of it's never been off of my personal machine before. There was cover art for some of them in a variety of different formats. There were lyrics for most, but again in a variety of different formats - I had different metadata from each of the different sources and I wanted to unify them so they could be edited seamlessly. The lyrics were in .srt or .lrc format and usually needed hand-tweaking so I wanted a one-click way to open those in Subtitle Edit. I had a ComfyUI workflow that took descriptions, tags, and lyrics to auto-generate cover art for the songs, I wanted to be able to do that at the click of a button and hand-edit the image prompt if I didn't like what it came up with. And so forth, lots and lots of special circumstances that applied to this bundle of data that are probably unique.

So I had a coding AI write tools specifically to handle all that. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.

The Aurora Borealis?

Sorry from Pittsburgh, we're having such mixed reactions from tech startups in Silicon Valley 2.0. All the small businesses are freelancers that saw AI, LLMs, as a get rich quick scheme. A lot of my friends and acquaintances from pre AI boom over use and abuse AIs for project management, retooling, and like my sister uses it for vibe coding and advice. I witnessed many people crash out from AI usage, I haven't touched the thing in 2 years. Google, Duolingo, and the smaller tech giants are installing data centers in Appalachian communities and towns.
For being such a smart city we are really AI dumb. We need a lot more information campaigns and empathy training.

Unless it's all original work, or you personally bootleged the tracks, dropped needle would have worked. It's whole purpose is to organize a library that was cobbled together from various sources.

It first tries to match the track using Music Brainz and local metadata, but if that fails, it'll use the audio fingerprint with AcoustID to determine it.

It's not foolproof, though. I have had some tracks that it couldn't identify the release, but all I had to do was delete the track and let it find the right release on soulseek or Usenet.

The most painful part is having to do an "organized files" dry run before it'll actually write the correct metadata, move and rename tracks, and write lyrics or replay gain. But that's mostly because my library is nearly 1TB.

Plus it can use both OpenSubonic and Jellyfin APIs to stream music to apps like Symfonium.

It is, in fact, all original work. Much of it has never been off the hard drive it was generated on (the stuff by local models), and when Riffusion got bought out they deleted all the stuff their users had generated so my local copies of those are the only ones left. The metadata is in sidecar .json files, except for the Udio tracks which were in .txt files that first needed to be converted to .json. All very ad-hoc stuff to begin with.

Also, it looks like Dropped Needle is aiming to make the music available for streaming through things like Jellyfin. That's not what I wanted, I wanted to make a web site specifically so that I could control the layout and contents for when I share it with friends (many of whom are not technically savvy and so only know how to click on a web URL).

This really wasn't a "just use pre-existing application X" situation. Even if there had been one that could handle all of that, configuring it would have taken just as much work as explaining to the coding AI what I wanted.

At this time of day?

Hey! The judge told us not to speak of that name ever again. Under penalty of torture!

You’re saying original work but then also saying “generated on” and referencing local models.

So like. AI generated?

I HATE this analogy as someone first hearing someone has tried to make it. As someone who not only loves food, but also enjoys cooking a fair bit, I would compare vibe/cuck coding to a home cooked meal only if that cook is using the most rotten and moldy ingredients, only to throw it out and order takeout and pretend they made it... after throwing mold over all the food.

Yes, AI generated. Use whatever word makes you happy, it really doesn't matter to me. The key point is that it's not music that would be on any existing catalogue anywhere. There's no way to "look it up" anywhere. The only metadata that exists for those tracks are in the files on my own computer.

It's more of an Albany expression

You were right to call me out on that. I was mistaken when I said it was Aurora borealis. Your kitchen is on fire.

Would you like to hear a list of the most common kinds of kitchen fires?

I'd love a look at the code if you don't mind. Sounds interesting as I have a similar mess of files going back 30-years.

1. Grease
2. electrical
3. the other ones

Oh, I'm sure you wouldn't love to look at it. :) It's not exactly messy, AIs are good at keeping things tidy, but everything about it is ad-hoc. It was never intended to be seen my another mortal's eyes than mine. I don't think there are any API keys or other secrets tucked away in the repo's history but I'd rather not risk it.

Your mess of files is different from my mess of files and the things you'd want to do with them is different from what my code does, I'd suggest getting your own agent on the task from a blank slate. That's the whole point I've been arguing here, that coding agents make these kind of bespoke "home-cooked" applications a lot easier to spin up.

As I recall, my first steps weren't even to have the coding agent write code. I explained my general goal and told it to look through the folders itself to see what work it thought needed doing. That was how I learned that almost all the cover art I'd downloaded from Udio years ago was actually AVIF format that had just been given the file extension JPG, for example - I didn't even know that needed to be fixed.

Make sure you back up your files before turning an AI loose on them, of course. Mine's been very well behaved (I warned it that avoiding data loss was the most important priority) but mistakes can be made.

Vibe coding is more like getting metas muse ai agent to order some crap fast food from uber eats than it is like home cooking 😂

Use whatever word makes you happy.

slop

And there are sites like Adafruit which are like cooking magazines whose stories are now all like “Sashimi pizza! This food hacker thought it would be a cool idea and ordered Uber Eats to send him some”

am i the only one who perceives the "look at how stupid other people are, they don't even know the craft" as despicable toxicity?

i mean, we all get that vibe coders are not the coding experts or computing gurus but why ridicule them?

Because they use technology that is actively contributing to the destruction of forests, and the heating of the planet.

yes

like people who drive cars

or use power

or products by other bad companies

Okay. So presumably you now feel happy.

What does using that word change about the practical matters being discussed here? Any effect at all?

Vibe coding with AI and calling it a home cooked meal is like slightly guiding your child in cooking dinner and calling the burned mound that comes out a meal. You really cannot leave them alone, and I have never had a session where I dont completely stop it and correct it on what its doing. My employer loves this, apparently.

My interest is in seeing how you approached different problems, not because I think I could use it for myself.

Yeah.

Your slop used to organize your other slop is slop.

It’s not a home cooked meal.

It’s slop. Passed off as not slop.

Because artists make music, and a human can write software to do what they need to do. Just like a real home cooked meal is made by a human.

So enjoy your home cooked meal of slop but in my house we say #NeverSlop

Alright, got the name-calling tantrum out of your system? I'll go back to doing exactly what I was doing before, now.

Heard, but stop trying to pass slop off as “original work”

Be real with yourself and others when you describe it. Hope this helps!

Nope, didn't help or harm in the slightest. As I said, going back to what I was doing before, this exchange was pointless.

Referenced link

https://bradfrost.com/links/post/an-app-can-be-a-home-cooked-meal/

Ah, the code itself won't really help with that.

My setup is: LM Studio running the local model Qwen3.8-27V, quantized down to Q4 with Q8 for the KV cache, on my system that gives me 128000 tokens context. The harness is VS Code with the Qwen Code Companion installed.

I opened the folder that has all the music I wanted to organize as a workspace, adding a git repository with all the actual music folders gitignored. This was the first prompt I gave the agent once all that was in place:

The folder you're in, and the subfolders inside it, are where I've been putting the music that I've generated using various AI music generation services (and my own local Ace-Step 1.5 model) over the past year or so. I've stored a lot of metadata (usually in a .json file) along with the music files themselves, along with lyrics in .srt and .lrc form, cover art, and so forth - different formats, different sources, not entirely consistent. I've decided that it's about time that I try to organize this all a bit better, and I'll be enlisting your aid. :)

[ A few specific paragraphs about the details of the filesystem layout omitted]

Before I explain the format the text files are in and how I'd like them to be converted, would you like to take a look around the folders to familiarize yourself with them and write whatever preliminary memories and notes you might want? And of course ask me questions about the stuff in here if anything isn't clear in its purpose or organization.

Then after it had looked around and had read the various different metadata formats, it asked me some questions about what data I'd like to have in "unified" metadata files for each of the tracks, file naming conventions, and whether I wanted it to do anything with the cover art and subtitle files. I answered the various questions (telling it to leave the cover art and subtitles alone for the time being) and it wrote some python scripts that ran through all the existing metadata to tidy up the stuff that fit existing patterns and create a list of all the oddball exceptions it ran across for me to fix manually. It found stuff like situations where the punctuation was different between music file and metadata file, where there were cover images with no apparent music associated with them, and so forth.

It became a back-and-forth exchange of me telling it what to fix and it finding new things that I didn't know needed fixing. Eventually I had enough random Python scripts to wrangle that I asked it to write a GUI, which made it much more convenient for me to edit the metadata by hand wherever needed as well.

Now, we all know how fucking awful oil and gas companies are, and auto manufacturers, however in many places it’s impossible to have a job and survive without a vehicle. There are far too many sprawling metroplexes that are impossible to navigate without the use of a car.

That aside, it is entirely possible to get through life without the use of AI.

With AI, it’s a race to the bottom. They are ignoring eco regulations, ignoring what citizens want, and pouring billions of dollars into the construction of data centers, manufacturing of GPUs, and advertising to make AI successful because it HAS TO BE SUCCESSFUL otherwise they stand to seriously lose. Environment be damned, they will and are destroying forests, dumping waste into water supplies, and contributing tons of waste heat into the atmosphere while grossly under reporting it.

This is a MASSIVE difference than the above mentioned.

Not to mention the fact that AI only exists through the theft of IP of artists, scientific journalists, mathematicians, journalists, poets, authors, and everything between. Laws don’t apply to them because they peruse the greater good that is their shareholder’s profit and no government can stand in their way.

No one NEEDS AI, yet they continue to force it on society because failure is not an option for them. Adopt it or else. That’s the message.

this is exactly how fossil fuels came to dominate the economy. not because people actually needed them, but because investors invested so much and shoved the tech down everybody's proverbial throat until there was no way out anymore

please, don't get me wrong! i am against LLM driven techno fascism as any other sensible person, all i'm trying to say is that being an arrogant, elitist prick looking down on others will not abolish capitalism

When I was 12 I used to make home cooked meals of kraft dinner or microwaved hot dogs or frozen pizzas for myself every time I was home alone. Picked up so many great cooking tips from the back of the boxes.