Vibe-Coded Flattery

I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world.It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I was doing; I only really knew HTML and CSS at this point. The idea, so esoteric, died on the vine; I often forget about it myself.Eventually, I found another idea that I thought had real potential. But I had a different reason for building it: Beyond having been laid off, I hated not finishing projects, and I wanted to understand what it would feel like to see something through.So, I did. That became my site ShortFormBlog. It was a lot of work, and a lot of heart went into it. At the time, there were always new, weird things that emerged online.This spirit of creation is what gave us interesting sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt,…