Hi there! I’d like to share my project with you all.
What is this? Vigil is a lightweight, self-hosted dashboard that watches your Docker images and tells you when updates are available. It’s a ready-to-run Docker setup with a simple install scripts. I know most people don’t like scripts, but since I’m a tech noob I find it pretty useful. For all the pros out there, you can check the script by yourself. This is my first “real world” project so it might not be as polished as other apps out there. It’s a hobby that I started cultivating a few months ago and I’m pretty excited with the results. However, it’d only mean something significant, if other people use it and give their own opinions about it.
If you have a few minutes, I’d really appreciate you trying it out and leaving a review or suggestions on the repo or even here. I’d do my best to answer most of the comments.
Edited because the link wasn’t showing up and giving more details about the project. https://github.com/kumucode/vigil.git
You are potentially putting yourself at risk and others as well by making it public. I run a VPS in the cloud, so I would never, ever install this app on it, even though I firewall it to my own IP ranges. Your agent has access to the docker group and the tokens are sent and stored in plaintext, as per the SECURITY.md file. That means any leak of a token could lead to total hostile takeover of the server. Adding that you don’t understand the codebase yourself just pushes this further over the edge.
Sure, I get it. It’s fun to build things. But I’ve always found it more fun to actually build things myself. These days, everybody is building these huge, monolithic codebases that nobody understands anymore. I don’t believe that it’s impossible to learn the things required to make a full application. True, you can’t learn everything, but that’s because there are so many different things that do slightly different things, and each week something new comes along. So you specialize a bit. But it’s fun to learn, and just telling an AI to do it makes you lazy.
I don’t know, I don’t like it. I do use AI during development, but I throw smaller things at it, so I can actually look at the code and approve it every time something changes. In some ways, it feels similar to what I used to do, which was reading documentation and copying the examples in it. Now the AI agent can pull that by itself and insert it into the code. However, I built the structure and original foundation myself, so I keep a firm grasp of it. I personally enjoy creating good code more than I enjoy piling on features generated by the AI, but these days it seems quantity over quality is appreciated more.
I don’t develop profesionally anymore, but I’ve read so many stories online about senior developers getting depressed and considering a career change, because their managers think it’s cool to let AI take over their old jobs, while they are left doing code reviews and undoing the fuckups that AI threw at them.
Every week I see several new iOS app on Reddit for tracking your fitness, habits, reminders, expenses, subscriptions, and they are always introduced in the same way: “I grew tired of how x apps do y, so I built my own” while stating that “this is my first app.” And there’s always a $15/month subscription on it! The internet is filling up with cheap Chinese replicas of applications, except that they are not sold cheaply.
People are writing their posts using AI, and then replying to everyone in the thread in Spanish, because why not? Let’s not even try anymore! Open source projects are in trouble, because the volunteer maintainers cannot get through the automatic AI slow pull requests on GitHub to get to the high-quality ones.
I just really don’t like how the current landscape looks, especially in the future. The ensloppification of everything.
End of rant. :)