u/Ordinary-Custard-737

I’ve been coming across so many jellyfin clients that it’s getting tiring, as all of you are. The basis is always the same : MPV, libVLC, ExoPlayer, so why bother if the result is the same?
Which is why on the other hand I’ve been so intrigued by vibe-coded clients for legacy platforms that get no love and might genuinely get some “cause I can” client that might really be cool. After all, installing into an old device (especially a gaming console) a homebrew jellyfin app might get you back into the games of your childhood.
So I thought: If you want to do it - go all the way, port it to the ps1, the vita, invent a way ti make it work on the gamecube, on solaris os, on powerpc mac os, but make it worthwhile.
We could even compile a list of “jellyfin clients for obscure and legacy devices”, would be cool.

What started as fun, interesting use of LLMs has, it seems to me, spiraled into something completely out of control. While new apps get created at lightning speed, especially if spearheaded by developers who have an idea of what they are doing, it's made the self-hosted space from something with 2-3 options per media category into a very crowded, messy space.

Take a look, for example, at the book side : we now have Bookorbit, Grimmory. Completely new apps, and yet, somehow, they look the same. Why? Because the devs used AI during development. Take a closer look, and you'll be able to make out immediately if an app was made with AI: bright pill-shaped buttons, often green, catchy "it's not X, its' Y!" descriptions, Docs with emoji, and the somehow same settings and menu layout.

And it's not just a philosophical problem: how do people innovate if there's nobody to make new stuff? and how about the old, beloved projects, with their slightly clunkier but human-made UI? How about Kavita? Komga? Heck, even the broken mess that is Calibre-web . The UI isnt that good, but at least it was visually consistent.

Talented devs are leaving the established projects that were done tons of passion behind them to embark on a solo journey with LLMs, that starves the old projects, burns them out in months and will leave the space with old apps struggling to keep up on one side and a plethora of sleek. soulless AI-coded apps that will cycle through one after the other, making the space worse for eveyone.

So the problem, perhaps, isnt just AI, but the fact that people have to start being more humble , and accept just being a member of a thriving community instead of being the chief of a wasteland. The second option is much, much worse for the whole community.