I’ve been running OpenAltFinder for almost 16 months now, and received quite a bit of positive feedback. The directory has also grown substantially. Over the last few months I’ve been receiving more and more submissions that were AI-assisted/vibe-coded.

Personally I’m a bit skeptical (both quality wise, and longevity wise), but I also want to give everyone a chance to showcase what they’ve build. I had already added an “AI-assisted” label, but right now the majority of submissions include that label.

To counter this, I decided to build an AI-free version of it over at: https://noai.openaltfinder.com/, inspired by duckduckgo.

  • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
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    10 hours ago

    A running trend with these “open alternatives” sites is that they almost universally seem to have at least one proprietary “honorable mention” (either source available or straight up binary blobs). I haven’t been able to find one on this site, so that’s a win right there.

  • zip@pawb.social
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    23 hours ago

    An AI-free list containing alternatives for ChatGPT and Claude is kinda weird don’t you think?

  • illusionist@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Looks cool but I din’t like the framing. Yes, X is an alternative to Y but X is a valid option just by itself. By framing it like that it somehow sits always in the shadow of the proprietary software.

    • OpenAltFinder@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      It’s a fair point, the original idea was to make it easier for people to switch to open source software by framing it as “I’m looking for an X alternative, so here’s A, B and C”. But I can see the concern around that as well.

      • illusionist@lemmy.zip
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        1 day ago

        It’s still nice! It may be in the shadow today. Maybe not in 5 years anymore. Until then, this site is needed!

    • Captain Beyond@linkage.ds8.zone
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      9 hours ago

      Unfortunately this seems to be service as a software substitute it would be really nice to have this as a free software program that can be run locally.

      Interestingly if you run this detector on itself (as it invites you to do) you get a funny easter egg response that includes the statement “VibeDetect is an open-source tool built with Next.js and TypeScript. The code is available on GitHub — check it yourself to see how it works” along with a link labelled “View on GitHub (if it exists)” that goes to “github.com” with no repository. So I’m not sure what to make of that.

      For my part I was unable to find the source code for this on GitHub searching with DuckDuckGo or Kagi. The site itself offers no information on who built it, either.

    • OpenAltFinder@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 day ago

      The main detector at the moment is looking at the contributors in their commits. But you’re right, it will require some more detection.