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The Lament

Today, I read this mildly depressing note from @halokat.

halokat
Oct 11, 2025 23:52

It’s funny how with vibe coding nobody cares about anyone’s apps anymore.

Before you had to put in the effort - and people valued effort to give an app some attention.

But now you can make a crappy but working version of whatever in a few minutes. Low effort - low interest from people.

Even if the vibed app is more interesting and has neat features, people still don’t care because less effort went into creating it and it’s not as scarce anymore.

Scarce availability- people pay attention Abundance - no one cares.

Based on this it might be safe to conclude that we’re not likely to see more people on nostr just from more vibe coding.

We can’t forget that the people we think we’d attract here are vibing their own apps, and burning out on their own AI playground.

So what does this all lead to?

I imagine down the road our AI tools will be so powerful but abstracted that you’ll just connect wherever and whenever without even needing to create anything. It’ll just be on demand via whatever medium you choose. Question is: how far away is this? And what happens in between now and then?

Yeah, but we knew that.

That was always the vision of #GitCitadel. We said that we are a development team that uses Nostr, not merely a Nostr development team.

We use Nostr where appropriate and whatever else where that would be more appropriate. It is a useful part of our tech stack, on par with REST, RSS, TCP/IP, Bluetooth, Kubernetes, etc.

We promised that we would be offering:

  • stable, well-maintained apps
  • on our own infrastructure,
  • that all of the code would be FOSS,
  • and that we would focus on building complex, self-hostable websites
  • which would aim to offer extremely low-cost, censorship-resistent publishing forums for academics, intellectuals, homescholers, and developers.
  • That we would provide full-time, globally-available tech support.
  • And that we would do it, even if no one initially pays us to, because we are personally invested in the project’s success because we want to use it, ourselves.

All of which is more valuable (and much more difficult) than a succession of vibe-coded cellphone widgets built by drive-by hackers.

The Blob

He’s also missing the major point that Nostr came of age in parallel with AI-supported coding, and that’s a massive advantage that allows us to keep the protocol very lightweight and nimble.

Nostr is ideal for this new, AI age of development. It assumes you don’t need to define everything precisely, but a very few things exactly. Nostr goes through a constant organic evolution, as the AI coding takes the Nostr Core and pushes out the edges in every direction. That is why Nostr will eventually eat all other protocols: it can cherry-pick from them, with the help of artifical intelligence.

Software teams who embrace AI will move forward faster, as we have done recently, by updating our #Alexandria components to be more AI-friendly and plug-n-play.

MichaelJ
Oct 11, 2025 20:57

The #GitCitadel team is pleased to announce version 0.0.6 of Alexandria, now live on next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu!

This release features a UI overhaul, courtesy of our illustrious frontend developer @nusa. Notably, the main site menu has been moved into an expandable menu, reducing clutter and making links easier to find.

https://image.nostr.build/60acb28563b63d1b0097a5bde2831da5f03815c3a0d378c35b0d16b10e78eeb6.png

You’ll also notice a fresher and more consistent look to our UI components! That’s because Nusa has begun creating a Svelte component library for use within our project. It’s documented for AI, so we’ll be able to efficiently create consistent, beautiful UIs as we dream up new features. You can see some of the fresh UI components on a publication:

https://image.nostr.build/4aac916638985abc02ca0d0592c75dadd854ccc9e35f471897bf0fbb4306f8e4.png

Finally, be sure to check out our Notifications view, which you can reach by logging in and clicking on your profile picture, then clicking on “Notifications”. You can view and respond to Nostr notes of any kind, and you can see public message threads. Alexandria is one of the first Nostr clients to support public messages.

https://image.nostr.build/18e4d80ec1cbe07fefcf7a6dd6c9a0bb03885321599b7aefc1b713307c7e0814.png

Thank you to all of our supporters! We’re continuing to work on the app behind the scenes, so expect more updates Soon!

It’s so over. Good.

The years of hacking out Pets.com, throwing it to some investors, and then waiting for the grant or the IPO check…. Yes, it’s finally over. We all have to actually make an effort, now.

That’s long been the case, for software engineers outside of financial hotspots like Silicon Valley. We earn relatively modest salaries performing the digital equivalent of master plumbing or carpentry.

The only software worth using, now, is throwaway code and software craftsman code, both of which are written using AI. The middle has fallen out of the market.

Get up. Move faster.

get up

This was published on Alexandria and can be viewed on DecentNewsroom and Habla.


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