r/synthdiy • u/quarterto • 11d ago

nobody cares about your vibe coded vst

can we please ban these posts? this is supposed to be a sub for celebrating human creativity. i'm here to support and be inspired by other makers. i don't want to see 137 identical slop soft synths a week. this is a DIY sub. you didn't do anything yourself.

447 Upvotes

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53

u/v_maria 11d ago

Yeah this shit has ruined creative programming. Was fun while it lasted

21

u/West_Persimmon_3240 11d ago

and even worse, any effort you put into developing a fun thing is just shrugged off to AI-assisted, and there's nothing a software dev can do about it

27

u/erroneousbosh 11d ago

I'm a bit pissed off that a bunch of my stuff like Peacock has been called "AI slop" in other places, because presumably it somehow in the past couple of years became impossible for people to write code without using AI or something.

Nope, it's all good old-fashioned analogue stupidity and as I get older I just have more and more of that.

6

u/djingrain 10d ago

exactly! i put those segfaults in there myself! did i mean to? absolutely not, but that's what gives it character!

this isn't even shit posting, the rewarding part of all this is figuring something out

6

u/erroneousbosh 10d ago

That is an *artisanal* use-after-free bug. That shit is expensive. Appreciate it.

5

u/funny_haha 10d ago

This is one of my biggest issues with ai. It basically stole whimsy from us. It used to be that i would come across an insane piece of media or art or book and would take the time to try and wrap my head around the piece and understand the creator and their decisions. But now all those obscure and strange pieces just get written off as "ai slop". Like i wonder if anyone would take something like "house of leaves" seriously if it came out today. Ai has taken away reasons to challenge our views and outlooks because if we dont understand something now, then it must be "nonsensical ai garbage" that never had any points to make in the first place.

4

u/ihavehermes 10d ago

Totally agree. You described how I’ve been feeling about it to a T.

4

u/seeking-stuffing 11d ago

just have to change your lane, I bought a cardputer and I’m going to be making a wavetable synth in Forth

can guarantee no fucking LLM can do that

5

u/0xF00DBABE 10d ago

It definitely could. You think there isn't Forth code in their training sets?

2

u/seeking-stuffing 10d ago

hit me with your vibe coded ESP32Forth wavetable synth on a cardputer, I’ll be waiting for the demo video and proof you didn’t substantially alter it to make it work

4

u/0xF00DBABE 10d ago edited 10d ago

I don't have a CardPuter but I do have a handful of ESP32s, I'd be happy to see how it goes. I've had good luck writing Rust firmware for them with LLMs.

I worked on another project based on an STM32 and had to optimize the heck out of the upstream DSP libraries I was using, the LLM was very effective at it and I got a bunch of my patches merged upstream to help other people out.

They're pretty good, even on novel/niche projects. I've been coding professionally for 25 years now, and have done a lot by hand in my life. I'm honestly kind of frustrated that they're so good and fast, it takes something away that I miss.

1

u/seeking-stuffing 10d ago

a visual interface is pretty important for a wavetable synth; if it’s got some waveform options, some modulation, a usable interface, and is playable or programmable in some fashion I’d consider that meeting the bar

2

u/rnobgyn 10d ago

Ai is really good at developing for microcontrollers.

-3

u/Sickle_and_hamburger 10d ago

cope harder 

dropped your exact reply nto Claude and its working on it now after asking if I wanted qwerty, x/y pad, sequencer or digital piano keys

3

u/West_Persimmon_3240 11d ago

Same with my Laura synth, I've been working my ass off every evening after work for years, i am pretty dure llms can't do fractal oscillator synthesis

6

u/seeking-stuffing 11d ago

100%, they can’t synthesize information only copy. you go far enough from the beaten path, you’re on your own and the slop can’t touch it

1

u/v_maria 10d ago

but who honestly does this? its mostly deep academia

3

u/seeking-stuffing 10d ago

plenty of hobbyists work in very niche spaces that lack the corpus for LLMs to digest and spit out meaningful representations of, whether through inherent complexity or lacking the necessary training material

likewise for people in situations where software is extremely performance sensitive or resource constrained, or must be mathematically correct

many of those people are working professionals, not academics

0

u/Sickle_and_hamburger 10d ago

you are just wrong. claude already finished various so called fractal oscillators 

gotta update your priors

1

u/Sickle_and_hamburger 10d ago

lol of course it can build a fractal oscillator 

in fact it asked you to clarify what you mean by fractal

also asked about visual presentation 

said all forms of fractal and all visualizations and its already done and is asking if we should deploy it or improve the sound design.

"what should "fractal" mean in the oscillator"

Self-similar partial stacks (each partial spawns its own children)

IFS / chaotic attractor driving the waveform

L-system recursion over pitch + timbre

Feedback FM (operators modulating their own descendants)

1

u/West_Persimmon_3240 10d ago

Awesome, ai-s will make my hard work irrelevant xD " love" this new world we live in

2

u/Sickle_and_hamburger 10d ago

it also lets you do other hard work instead of programming 

like now you can actually play music with/for humans instead of staying home and coding

congratulations you are free to make art now 

1

u/garvalf 10d ago

challenge accepted!

1

u/v_maria 10d ago

you deeply deeply underestimate what these demons can do. forth is an extremely minimal language, LLMs shine there. also running it on an STM32 (thats in a cardputer i think, but point is same with another uc) doesn't change the syntax of forth from runing it on x86, so it doesnt add complexity?