It’s not your fault. The problem is now that my mother in law can vibe code a complete operating system, I cannot distinguish quality from shit any more. And the last few OSS projects that I tried that had the Claude icon where shit and breaking in many ways.

I think your prior assumption that all OSS projects had a degree of quality is where your problem is. But I get it.

We’ve had low quality code for as long as we’ve had programmable machines. I’ve seen a lot of manually written bad code well before LLMs took over. Nowadays, I primarily look at how long a repo has been around and how active it is. A repo that has consistent activity is probably going to be a higher quality one. Even better if I can follow PRs to see how the code base is evolving.

I will admit it’s become more difficult to tell low quality git repos from higher quality ones. Missing files or incomplete README files are a thing of the past. Claude is very good at filling in the gaps to make all repos at least appear respectable.

It's kinda like eternal September but for software engineering. There was a time that just being on the internet, having an email address, etc. was a signal that indicated a level of technical proficiency. Now everyone has that connectivity, it doesn't mean anything anymore.

Same concept, but github repos now.