Isn’t a “local emulator of cloud services” kind of the perfect project to be vibe coded? Extremely well documented surface to implement, very easy to test automatically and prove it matches the spec, and if you make some things sub optimal performance wise, that is totally fine because by project will not be used in a tight loop anyway - e.g. it will just need to be faster than over the network hop plus the time it takes for the cloud to actually persist things. This can just need to do this in ram and doesn’t need to scale.
So I’m shocked cloud providers haven’t just done this themselves, given how feasible it is with the right harness
AWS _does_ officially provide local-first dev containers for services like DynamoDB but sadly not every AWS service comes with those. Why? I have no idea, like you said it's clearly feasible and they already do it for some services today...
Not necessarily. Would you respond the same if the previous person said, "Was this built using an IDE" or "What qualifications do you have to write this software"?
Shit code can be written with AI. Good code can also be written with AI. The question was only really asked to confirm biases.
As someone who has worked in projects with hundreds of seemingly trivial dependencies which still manage to produce a steady stream of security notices, "What qualifications do you have to write this software" seems like an entirely reasonable, far too seldom asked question to me.
I dont automatically dismiss ai slop but when its obvious this was barely reviewed and sloppily committed with broken links 404ing or files missing from git, then it is slop.
Using llm as a tool is different from guiding it with care vs tossing a one sentence prompt to copy localstack and expecting the bot to rewrite it for you, then pushing a thousand file in one go with typos in half the commit message.
Longevity of products comes from the effort and care put into them if you barely invest any of it to even look at the output, look at the graveyard of "show hn" slop. Just a temporary project that fades away quickly
There are no code commits. The commits are all trying to fix ci.
The release page (changelog) is all invalid/wrong/useless or otherwise unrelated code changes linked.
Not clearly stating that it was AI written, and trying to hide the claude.md file.
The feature table is clearly not reviewed, like "Native binary" = "Yes" while Localstack is no. There is no "native" binary, it is a packed JVM app. Localstack is just as "native" then. "Security updates Yes" .. entirely unproven.
I'll have a much harder time convincing my company to try out such a tool if it's AI slop than when there's a group of people behind it.
I'll happily use it for personal development stuff if I ever decide to try cloud stuff in my free time, but it's hardly an alternative to established projects like LocalStack for serious business needs.
Not that any of it should matter to the people behind this project of course, they can run and make it in whatever way they want. They stand to lose nothing if I can't convince my boss and they probably shouldn't care.