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A post by [object Object] (@zzt@mas.to) saying: courtesy of @davidgerard@circumstances.run, 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/114961415946154957It 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
Visual Studio and VS Code have an AI assistant as well, yet we don’t decree all programs written with them as ‘vibe coding’. The presence of an AI assistant in the IDE isn’t evidence of vibe coding.
Proton’s repo here is open source. What portion of it presents issues? Any?
I think the difference here is cursor is a fork of VS code that is specifically dedicated to AI based workflows. Which means it's highly likely, although not guaranteed, that AI is being used as opposed to the other options you mentioned which are very popular IDEs where AI is a secondary feature that might not even be enabled. That being said I don't think there's anything wrong with using AI with oversight, what I do see as a problem is the fact that in the face of criticism they went and hid the evidence. That's terrifying for a privacy focused organization to do.
Exactly- well said. AI coding assistants are a tool to be used like any other - but it’s still the software engineer who responsible for the code at review