**#A quick edit to address something important and provide a disclaimer: **
Thank you all for your feedback! This project was “vibecoded” with Cloude AI and serves more as a “proof of concept” for what could be achieved with AI assistance. I’m just a tech enthusiast, and I’m excited to continue exploring new possibilities. I understand there’s a real concern about “AI Slop,” but that’s exactly why I’m sharing this project with you all so that experts who are interested in the idea can offer guidance or even help improve it.
I’ve noticed that many people with home labs prefer to update their applications manually instead of relying on other apps that automate the process. Often, they have to check each one individually. That’s where Vigil comes in. The primary function of Vigil is to centralize the information and give users clear visibility of which applications are outdated, their current version, and the newer version available from several sources. This way, you can decide what and when to update.
To be honest, I hope it ends up being useful to others as it is for me.
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.
In this world of technology, applications there are too many areas of expertise required to make things “functional” I’m not sure if I can learn everything required to make applications at the level of the most popular ones. I’m more interested in general knowledge and putting ideas out there. I still think that getting this project to the public even if it’s not that great, is still better than have it just on my computer. So, the main purpose is to hear from people what they think of the project, maybe inspire others with more experience to put their projects out there too. My expectations were pretty low about this project, but it turned out to be a great experience to engage with many people from different background just like you.
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. :)
haha that’s ok bro, have you rant. I’m a Mr. complainer myself. Although, I’ve been trying really hard lately to avoid “unnecessary or premature criticism” and this shit is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried. Regarding the security concerns, I absolutely agree with you that this is top priority and mandatory. That’s why we set testing environments for this type of things, right? There’s a common feeling that I’ve noticed from the tech community regarding the usage of AI that to me is similar to “musicians vs DJs” or “classical musicians vs Jazz”, I’m sorry if this analogy isn’t the best one, but these are the communities that I’m more familiar with. Some are really opened, others are absolutely against and concerned (rightly so to some degree) and others fall in the middle. I think what we’re experiencing is more of a huge paradigm change, a clash of personalities and the natural fear of the unknown and changes. Maybe the most excited people are really the ones who knows very little and have no idea of the negative potential of these tools or perhaps the so skeptical ones are those who don’t know yet how to reconcile this shift and what to make out it. Who knows? I’ll end up with my rant too… I hate the “enshitification” of the internet content because of AI lol. I’ve read somewhere that the AI text have surpassed the human generate one in the web :,( Lots of people have claimed that my comments “look like AI”… as if they would be that good at identifying it anyways. I’m not a bot by the way. I just found that Lemmy feels more genuine than Reddit (let’s leave this rant to another time).
Peace bro!