Was the web UI vibe coded?

[andre4ik3]

Sorry but with the strange UI design, cards and pills, the gradient in the top right, and the em dashes in the code comments, I have to ask whether it was developed using an LLM... (not that it in itself is a problem, but I am concerned about code quality for something as important and security-sensitive as a network firewall application)

[starkjohann]

I'll make a blog post about that in the near future. Yes, much of the JavaScript is AI generated. While I am fluent in C, ObjC, Swift, some PHP and meanwhile Rust, I have never done a serious project in JavaScript and I must admit that I don't really like it.

As far as I can tell (please correct if I'm wrong), security is not so much of an issue for a localhost only service. The backend is trusted, no need to defend against that.

But the Web UI is Open Source for a purpose. There are people more fluent in JavaScript than I am who can review it, suggest improvements or even write their own version.

[andre4ik3]

Thank you, I appreciate the transparency. If you don't know much about the JS ecosystem I would really recommend looking into other solutions for the web UI other than plain JS, e.g. React or Svelte or something like that. Also documentation for the web API would be really nice, so people can build their own interfaces instead of having to reverse engineer :-)

[starkjohann]

There is some documentation in the Readme file. The data type definitions of the API currently live in the closed source part, but that's for practical reasons only. I'll put this on the to-do list.

Why plain JS? When I start with something that's new to me, I prefer to start at the very baseline. If you start at an abstraction layer, you never really understand how things work. I've started with the animation part, where rows of a table move animated according to instructions from outside. This was the proof-of-concept that a WebUI can do what I want.

If I would start from scratch, with the knowledge I have now, I would probably choose Svelte or any similar framework.

[andre4ik3]

Thank you for clarifying!