cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/50693956
Transcript
A post by [object Object] (@[email protected]) saying: courtesy of @[email protected], Proton is now the only privacy vendor I know of that vibe codes its apps: In the single most damning thing I can say about Proton in 2025, the Proton GitHub repository has a “cursorrules” file. They’re vibe-coding their public systems. Much secure! I am once again begging anyone who will listen to get off of Proton as soon as reasonably possible, and to avoid their new (terrible) apps in any case. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114961415946154957
It has a reply by the author saying: in an unsurprising update for those familiar with how Proton operates, they silently rewrote their monorepo’s history to purge .cursor and hide that they were vibe coding: https://github.com/ProtonMail/WebClients/tree/2a5e2ad4db0c84f39050bf2353c944a96d38e07f
given the utter lack of communication from Proton on this, I can only guess they’ve extracted .cursor into an external repository and continue to use it out of sight of the public
Cursor is literally marketed as “The AI Code Editor”. I am not sure why anyone would use an AI code editor if they aren’t planning on vibe coding.
Proton is, in my opinion, a bad privacy company anyway. Vibe code or not, stop paying them.
Vibe coding means only looking at the results of running a program generated by an agentic LLM tool, not the program itself - and it often doesn’t work well even with current state-of-the-art models (because once the program no longer fits in the context size of the LLM, the tools often struggle).
But the more common way to use these tools is to solve smaller tasks than building the whole program, and having a human in the loop to review that the code makes sense (and fix any problems with the AI generated code).
I’d say it is probably far more likely they are using it in that more common way.
That said, I certainly agree with you that some of Proton’s practices are not privacy friendly. For example, I know that for their mail product, if you sign up with them, they scan all emails to see if they look like email verification emails, and block your account unless you link it to another non throw-away email. The CEO and company social media accounts also heaped praise on Trump (although they tried to walk that back and say it was a ‘misunderstanding’ later).
Unfortunately so is Visual Studio and VS Code, yet we don’t say anything made with them is ‘vibe coded’. The text, big and bold, right the top of the screen for VS Code is literally:
vim or bust
Ok, but VS has been around MUCH longer and has been widely used long before any AI features were added. People who have been using VS for years, aren’t likely to just switch, especially in professional environments where VS has largely dominated.
Cursor OTOH, was specifically made to leverage AI. You don’t just start using Cursor.
Depends on leadership. A bunch of slop loving execs think having the newest AI tool will make them be ahead of the curve
Some people like it for the ui and they recently announced the ability to turn off all ai features.