showcaseearth

Short lived and driven by good intentions– all's good. Thanks again for keeping this thing going!

The vibe coded aspect of this article seems quite irrelevant to me. If I read this correctly, an exec team (or just CEO?) got sold a terrible piece of software without proper vetting. Very bad software has existed for a long time, and this is an age-old story. Vibe-coded garbage perhaps has increased the volume of terrible stuff to wade through, but is secondary to a familiar story of dumb leaders making dumb decisions.

Yep, this is it. I've heard similar.

I worked for a few years at a 100+ year old privately owned (same family) B2B supplier with insane profits. Website was outdated but highly practical, sales/CRM (if you can call it that) systems were mostly command line and hadn't changed fundamentally since the 1980s. These systems worked, and any proposal to change anything took months of meetings and debates and review of every cost/benefit possible. Proving that a change directly translated to a clear revenue metric was nearly impossible– for at least this niche, would more modern sales software actually translate to more orders? (answer: not really, a question reanalyzed every few years in depth). Would a nicer website get more conversions? (also no, something A/B tested to death every few years). Changing the position of one product grouping by a few pixels might be a 6 month job, lol.

By contrast, their fulfillment center was cutting edge, highly automated, and relatively experimental– if it improved the speed and cut costs, they jumped right on. These are much easier to measure as profitable.

It's quite possibly the smoothest and best running GIS software available today

lol, the bar is not high. It can be both the smoothest and extremely janky at times. Let's be honest with ourselves here. (and I do agree, it's among the best running... but also janky).

+100. There is very little QGIS cannot do as well or better than ArcGIS. For any shortcomings, there are generally other specialized tools that can fill the gaps. It's really just a training issue more than technical one at this point imo.

Did you actually read the post? The author describes exactly why. It's not to filter and dismiss, but it's to deprioritize spending cycles debugging and/or coaching a contributor on code they don't actually understand anyway. If you can articulate how you used AI, demonstrate that you understand the problem and your proposed solution (even if AI helped get you there), then I'm sure the maintainers will be happy to work with you to get a PR merged.

I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

I doubt a PR is going to be buried if it's useful, well designed, good code, etc, just because of this disclosure. Articulate how you used AI and I think you've met the author's intent.

If the PR has issues and requires more than superficial re-work to be acceptable, the authors don't want to spend time debugging code spit out by an AI tool. They're more willing to spend a cycle or two if the benefit is you learning (either generally as a dev or becoming more familiar with the project). If you can make clear that you created or understand the code end to end, then they're more likely to be willing to take these extra steps.

Seems pretty straightforward to me and thoughtful by the maintainers here.

One of the best takes on vibe coding yet. Amazing writing, like always.

+100 here. I think everyone should try this exercise– browse outside your algorithm. It's a sea of garbage to sort through.

This is usually okay... what's not okay is that usually this narrative is broken up by ads, a constantly changing layout as you scroll, and eventually jumping so many times you can't resume scrolling, then eventually crashing because too many trackers/ads/etc overwhelmed the browser (on mobile).

omg, this is a gem

The lack of boundaries below national level is off-putting. Both the style and the tile spec itself seem to need a lot of refinement... highways look like a patchwork at low zoom. I had also thought shortbread excluded a lot of POI types, but maybe I need to review again.

But that's not to diminish the accomplishment overall here for the OSM page itself– this is an awesome step forward!

+1. Google launched their (proprietary) vector tiles in 2013 as well, and I'd even argue that vector has been the standard well over 5 years now.

Likewise, not sure how this will be sustainable. "Even google"... I'd instead say "Especially google". It's already a mess out there, and I hope Google and others take an active role in at least trying to make things usable.