**#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primary function of Vigil is to centralize the information and give users clear visibility of which applications are outdated, their current version, and the newer version available from several sources.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.
Yikes. That doesn’t give me confidence for something that needs root access to the Docker UNIX socket. Was this vibe coded? Do you understand the code and architecture of the application? You wrote you only started a few months ago. I don’t mean to be hard on you, but this kind of application has no business being insecure.
Hi Thaurin, I appreciate your feedback, I understand that security must be a top priority. I’m glad your pointing it out. If you have any advice on how to improve it, it’ll be more than welcome.
If you want to learn to develop web applications, try to understand everything you do. Don’t let the entire thing be generated by AI. Do small changes and commit those one at a time. Understand the programming language, your application’s architecture, internet security, and so forth. Not understanding and then releasing it publicly and later asking for advice on how to improve it, isn’t the way. You’re still the maintainer of the project now, and will have to understand and approve any PR’s people may send your way.
I mean, it can be addictive to just let AI throw everything together in a week without learning anything consequentual. But I wouldn’t throw it on my server with root access to Docker. What’s your real interest here? Learning or telling AI to make stuff for you?
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. :)