#490 It’s a vibe coding party

Topics covered in this episode:

• Some more things about Django I've been enjoying
• Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?
• Where Did All Your AI Tokens Go? AgentsView to the rescue!
• Careful with phishing all
• Extras
• Joke

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Calvin #1: Some more things about Django I've been enjoying

• Julia Evans is learning "2010-style" web dev (Django + SQL + server-rendered HTML) after years of Go backends and JS-heavy frontends
• Query builders: likes defining custom QuerySet classes with chainable filter methods (.approved().future().with_tags()) — more readable than raw SQL
• Template filters: highlights urlize, linebreaksbr, json_script, and especially querystring for building/modifying query-string links in templates
• Migrations: still loves Django's auto-generated migrations — 19 and counting on her project
• Skips inheritance for class-based views; prefers function-based views for sharing code, though fine using Django's own mixins/interfaces
• Performance surprise: CPU profiling (via py-spy) — not slow DB queries — revealed the culprit; she'd accidentally disabled the cached template loader, and re-enabling it took throughput from ~2-3 req/s to ~12 req/s on a $10/mo VM

Michael #2: Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

FT Magazine piece by Sam Learner (July 11) on AI coding tools overwhelming open source maintainers - sent in by listener Dylan McConnell, whose main point was that this ran in the Financial Times, not a dev blog.

• cURL as the case study - Daniel Stenberg has been the only full-time person on it for years; libcurl has been installed an estimated 20+ billion times with 3,000+ listed contributors.
• Bug bounty killed - cURL ended its paid security bounty program in January, citing an "explosion of AI slop reports" that take real time to debunk and drain morale.
• Extractive contributions - authoring a PR is now nearly free, reviewing one still costs a human; tldraw's Steve Ruiz closed outside contributions entirely, asking why he'd want someone else writing the easy part.

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