I actually have different problems with Chaptarr aside from it being vibe coded.
Generally, I don’t have an issue with vibe coding - as long as it’s not the average person’s Star Trek level depiction of asking the computer an overly simplified request which it then successfully extrapolates into a fully working solution. AI aided development isn’t an issue really as long as the developer knows what they want to achieve and HOW to do it, and utilising AI to do the heavy lifting.
No, my problem with Chaptarr is the general approach of the maintainer. It’s a fork of Readarr (clearly visible from the logs), which was licenced under GPLv3, which in turn requires any forks (derivatives) to publish source code. Now, RLH has been providing Docker images only, claiming “the code is too messy to publish” whenever asked, meaning there’s absolutely no oversight as to what is actually happening inside, what’s been modified and so on.
Furthermore he modified the metadata server format, without publishing it, then created two separate APIs for it, which you have to manually edit after install (and this is hidden in the FAQs on Discord), that metadata server is incredibly limited (because it’s supposed to be for “testing only”), and there’s no option to use your own either, as the API contract has changed.
RLH is also pretty opaque about updates, sometimes you get a flurry of updates within a few hours, sometimes you’re sitting around for weeks without any changes being pushed. He’s also been pretty shady, randomly making the DockerHub images available to anyone then restricting it, and I’ve also heard about random bans of people on Discord who dared to question him (although this is only hearsay, I have not witnessed any bans myself, so take this with a pinch of salt).
Overall the whole project is super shady and even if I presume the best intentions, the continued GPL licence violation with various quality issue excuses alone is enough for me to stay far away from it - even if I appreciate some of the QoL changes I’ve seen when I trialled it.
As for which project to use… The issue with book management is that it’s exponentially more complex than other media due to the number of dimensions a book can be on.
Author metadata alone can be problematic - some books are published under different names in different countries, some books are co-authored but published under all variations of the possible combinations (author 1 or author 2 or both, and that’s if there’s only two authors).
Language as a dimension usually means the same book is actually a different variant. This also applies for series info.
Then there’s the issue of metadata quality. Unlike with TV shows and movies, where either IMDb or TheTVDb etc. can be used because generally all of these potential sources are good quality… books don’t really have a central database, because unlike with the aforementioned, language as a dimension does affect the release, and can’t be easily treated as the same entity as different language publications will have different IDs… So if you have a database of US books, that won’t apply to anywhere else in the world. Of course GoodReads and HardCover are trying to fix this but you’re still running into issues like API usage limits etc.
Overall, making a book download and management system akin to the rest of the Arr Suite is a major, major undertaking that requires major discussions not just within the project but also spanning external services to come to an agreement on which approach is best.