Hey, sorry for the late reply — I'm in the middle of switching to a European provider (Sweego) instead of Twilio/SendGrid for emails & SMS, so I cancelled my Twilio subscription since the user count is still relatively low. I hope to get this deployed along with a major release by Friday or earlier!
This is a very exhausting project to work on all by myself, and using LLMs to speed up investigating a test failure across 3,000 files isn't what I'd call immoral. But you're free to disagree. And I won't try to change your mind!
As for the video, that's a good idea. I'm just a solo developer though, and I'm doing this all by myself and I need to find funding to keep going, that's why I released in public beta even though I'm still ironing a few things out. A video is a good idea, and I'll be sure to add that.
I strongly disagree that me using LLMs for mechanical tasks every now and then means that you should think any different of Fluxer, a project that simply is way too complex to be "vibe-coded" in any shape or form.
The LLMephant in the room A lot of my work on this communication platform predates LLMs being used for everyday coding. I was already a capable software engineer, with formal education and experience working on large production systems. More recently, I've used LLMs in a careful manner. I treat their output like any other untrusted code: tests, integration tests, review, and a high bar for anything that ships. Used this way, LLMs have helped me deliver ideas faster and in a better shape. I'm aware that some people react strongly to the mere fact that LLMs were involved. The ethics of LLMs can be debated, but I'd rather that debate not be used to dismiss the work or my ability to do it. I'm one person, and I've still delivered something polished and competitive, based on early feedback from users with no connection to me. Fluxer has a lot of code because the problem is complex by nature. If the goal is to be competitive with Discord, you don't get there by avoiding hard engineering. I got here by studying how Discord was built, surveying technologies, and iterating until I landed on an approach that's similar in spirit. Discord is state of the art for a reason. Fluxer isn't what you'd call "vibe-coded." If you understand the scope of a platform like this, you already know it's not something you can conjure with just an LLM and no expertise. If you try Fluxer, I think you'll notice the quality. I didn't want to ship something half-baked, and I do take pride in what I've built. Although I've developed it privately, on and off, over the past five years – with thousands of commits and several tech stack iterations as my skills grew through learning by doing – the code has also been reviewed by other competent developers. Could I have done this without LLMs? Yes, but I'd have moved slower, and the burnout risk would've been higher. Even with help, I'm still pushing myself hard. LLMs helped me get further with limited time, but they didn't replace the engineering work.
This is what I'm working on regarding LLMs in my blog post draft.
The original commenter of the thread you quote-replied did call it "sketchy" precisely because they thought this was vibe-coded over a weekend.
I recognise that people might not comprehend the amount of work that has gone into this without a proper backstory, so a blog post is coming soon! Fluxer wants to be a truly open and FOSS alternative to Discord, and I've spent years of my life working on this, whilst studying at university.
This is not a proprietary, closed-source, commercially driven project. I'm not VC-funded. This is hard work and my own money spent on something I care about.
Demoing the app is very simple to do. I'm committed to making self-hosting a nice experience and that's what I've been working on for the past week and hope to release soon! I'm not sure what people are getting at here. A blog post is coming soon too, explaining my backstory.
bsky.app/profile/hamp...
I'm a bit surprised that people keep telling me that what I've built is somehow impossible or sketchy, when you can demo it for yourself. The code is there. It's free and open source software. I've spent over 5 years working on this.
I use docs.livekit.io/reference/in... for implementing voice & video support. So does github.com/element-hq/e.... I'm not sure what you're getting at by saying it's too good to be true, when you can demo it for yourself. The code is there and it works! :)
Once I have that out of the way, I would be happy to join a Kodsnack episode.
I could consider that! I'm a bit stressed at the moment, trying to wrap up the remaining tasks for a release post on r/selfhosted, and also writing a blog post about my journey to share on HN. I'm hoping it will bring in some traction and help me keep going financially.
You've given me the idea now though to add a blog section to the Fluxer marketing site and publish a first blog post detailing the journey that led me here as well as my credentials in a more easily-digestible and shareable format! I'll work on that tomorrow and post it here :D
(29/29) I realise that trust is earned. I've put my name, my money, and five years of labour into a project I've now donated to the FOSS community. I hope the credentials, company records, and the code itself provide the assurance you're looking for! A lot of hard work has been spent by me on this.
(28/?) Once again, if you're curious about the project vision or licensing, I answered several technical questions during the Product Hunt launch, including one from the inventor of the hashtag: producthunt.com/products/flu...
(27/?) I don't have a huge social media footprint because I preferred to work in private for most of the duration of this project, with trusted and competent persons helping me out with finding bugs and reviewing my code, because I didn't want to gain premature traction before I knew it was ready.
(26/?) ... production-ready, with >800 integration tests, a well-researched and implemented core foundation using proven technologies at scale (Discord, WhatsApp) using things like Cassandra and Erlang/OTP, there is an admin panel and T&S tools baked in too. And I'm giving it all out for free.
(25/?) So, Fluxer already has 6 Visionary supporters who paid $299 each during the beta. This isn't some kind of cash-grab, I'm a real person with publicly available credentials, and I deeply care about solving these types of problems! I just want to make that clear. This project is fully ...
(24/?) I also developed Discorch, an open-source tool for scrubbing Discord message history. I've been active in this space for years and I care deeply about privacy and data ownership! codeberg.org/discorch/dis...
(23/?) I completed my bachelor thesis right before I started working on this project full-time, back in September! You can find it published here: www.diva-portal.org/smash/record...
(22/?) During my time at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, I've completed courses in a wide range of computer science courses, network security, and developed an internal product for a large international security tech company, Giesecke+Devrient. I've also completed an advanced course in testing.
(21/?) ... on Elixir and Erlang/OTP, and I'm very passionate about the problems I'm solving to make Fluxer truly scalable in the same way Discord achieved scale. This is why I started working on this project to begin with, it was truly career-advancing for me, and I've learnt a lot all by myself.
(20/?) But all of the core tech in this codebase has been thoroughly debated and architected by me. I am the one who has implemented and put in a lot of years worth of my time to this project. I've done plenty of research through Discord's tech blog, Hacker News posts, reading books ...
(19/?) As mentioned, I would be crazy not to leverage LLMs in a highly controlled and intelligent fashion (I am competent and I know how to use LLMs responsibly) given the productivity boosts they provide, especially when working on UI-related code.
(18/?) I've also been paid high-severity security bounties by Discord. Last year I found an access control vulnerability that allowed bypassing authentication to act on behalf of other users. I've been in direct contact with Discord engineers a lot too, and I have great insight into their tech.
(17/?) My skills and expertise are also proven on my LinkedIn profile. I've been a member of Discord's QA program since 2019 and headed web infrastructure at NetherGames, responsible for things like backend and e-commerce for their massive user base. I'm used to managing real-time systems at scale.
(16/?) ... during the public beta, I'm seeing more people try it out and really like it. There's a reason for why it's a public beta, it was just recently launched! I can't boast a large user count yet, and that's why I'm looking for people to actually try it out. I'm once again just a solo dev.
(15/?) As for your question about how many people are using it regularly, since this platform didn't become production-ready before I did the production *public beta* release on January 2nd, naturally, not a whole lot of people are using it regularly. But I do, and a few others. And now ...
(14/?) ... aspect of Fluxer. Also see some of my comments on my Product Hunt launch, where I discussed some more of my thoughts on my business model and licensing: producthunt.com/products/flu...
