Humble Bundle just killed most of their security through vibecoding

(forums.spacebattles.com)

187 points | by rdmuser 1 hour ago

23 comments

  • trvz 15 minutes ago
    This is not AI's fault. In fact, they had to probably fight the LLM to get it this simple.

    I'm a subscriber to Humble Bundle Choice (their monthly offering), and it has been a pain to receive a code via email at every login.

    • WD-42 8 minutes ago
      This disaster never would have seen the light of day if it weren't for AI.
    • geraneum 9 minutes ago
      It’s the person’s fault who says you don’t need to review/read/understand the code. “2fa? that’s just gobbledygook”.

      I doubt you have to fight anything to get there.

  • Ekaros 54 minutes ago
    Perfect example of when rewrite is functionally worse for users and done for sake of doing it...

    I wondered why I did not get email code from them for login. Then it arrive one hour later... Seems like pretty big oversight...

  • 1313ed01 10 minutes ago
    Can someone there please just click the rollback button now and we can all forget this ever happened. I don't think that new site can be saved. The old site was fine. Just leave it like it was. I bought a bundle as recently as last month. Three bundles I think.

    If they just focus on finding more fun bundles to sell and don't touch the site code again, ever, it will be fine. I have been happily buying things I usually do not need from them since Humble Indie Bundle 1.

  • scaglio 7 minutes ago
    For anyone interested in deleting their account, I think this is the right link (at the bottom of the homepage): https://dsar.humblebundle.com/
  • agilob 39 minutes ago
    > so bad that they have one-click payments enabled (which is illegal) for purchases.

    Is this actually illegal in a jurisdiction or against ToS of payment providers and they can get permanently banned from using card payments?

    • petetnt 6 minutes ago
      I don't know about illegalness, I pressed "Get your games" button accidentally and it immediately deducted 12,99€ from my Paypal account without confirmation. What the hell.
    • ZiiS 18 minutes ago
      It used to infringe Amazon's patent; which is why it has only become common recently. Not illegal.
      • consp 17 minutes ago
        It is where I live. Not going to create an account to check if it is enabled there as well.
        • lxgr 11 minutes ago
          If they don't have any presence in and don't actively target your region, your local laws and regulations might not be the ones that govern the transaction, though. Not sure if Humble Bundle has crossed that threshold yet for most of their non-US markets.
    • ghurtado 36 minutes ago
      Probably the latter, not that it's any better.
      • nitroedge 33 minutes ago
        sad when the honorable ones get infiltrated.

        This last month has set my expectation that next month + next month is too many CVE's and I'm plugging the dam hole with my finger.

  • aeQu5igh 33 minutes ago
    They deleted the download link for the original humble bundle. I can no longer download Gish.
    • nvgeele 3 minutes ago
      I recently wanted to download a game I bought a long time ago through them (Machinarium, new macOS builds). Unfortunately the file on their CDN is corrupted. Their reply, after a week's worth of back and forth: sucks for you, it was sold too long ago so we won't bother fixing the issue.
  • jjbinx007 31 minutes ago
    Thanks for this. Been a Humble subscriber for years but this has just persuaded me to cancel
  • dava96 38 minutes ago
    I wonder if the issues I was having trying to download my ebooks from them is related to "vibe coding".

    It was pretty frustrating not being able to download the things I'd paid for.

  • rozenmd 53 minutes ago
    "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision"
    • roncesvalles 35 minutes ago
      As if anyone holds management accountable either. Big companies are full of VPs and Directors who make a mess and transfer orgs just before it comes back to bite them.
      • throwaway27448 34 minutes ago
        The only party truly above accountability is the shareholder (a questionable decision itself)
        • adwn 18 minutes ago
          > The only party truly above accountability is the shareholder (a questionable decision itself)

          This is decidedly not a "questionable" decision. I really, really shouldn't be held accountable for the conduct of any company in my ETF portfolio, as I have zero influence on their operations and zero insight into them (beyond what any member of the public has).

          • Ygg2 0 minutes ago
            If that is the case shareholders shouldn't have any influence outside of collect dividend and sell.
          • throwaway27448 2 minutes ago
            [delayed]
    • ruined 40 minutes ago
      "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must make every management decision"
      • dist-epoch 4 minutes ago
        HuggingFace incident strong precedent.

        You want to do a crime, subtly hint your AI about it.

      • ghurtado 35 minutes ago
        "A manager can never be held accountable, therefore a manager must make every computer decision"
  • bronlund 38 minutes ago
    I hate on hover menus with a passion.
    • syshyk 1 minute ago
      What doesn't help is if you click it it hides it again. This is a common design issue though.
    • genxy 14 minutes ago
      I thrashed 3x in a row trying to open the menu!
  • xx__yy 59 minutes ago
    Sounds like shotgun project, cheap model with low effort, at the controls of someone who doesn't know how to build software, end to end.

    AI doesn't produce bad software, people do.

    • l-mdev 0 minutes ago
      Guns don't kill people, people do.
    • zendist 53 minutes ago
      AI definitely produces bad software, too.

      It's up to the people involved in the process, to gatekeep AI to not *ship* bad software.

      • 0xbadcafebee 25 minutes ago
        AI makes bad software like a saw makes bad furniture. The final result is never the tool's fault
        • toledocavani 2 minutes ago
          I agree that the tool shouldn't be at fault, but I refuse to take responsibility when managers force me to use it.
        • vconnor 0 minutes ago
          But it's not a tool, anymore than IKEA is a tool.
        • necovek 4 minutes ago
          It's not really an apples-to-apples: you can ask an "AI" to build software to do a particular thing, and it will happily oblige and spend some of your money on it and produce something that actually runs.

          You cannot just turn the saw on (if electric), point it at some wood and expect anything resembling furniture.

        • blitzar 3 minutes ago
          Ai should randomly cut off people fingers occasionally as a polite reminder
        • geraneum 4 minutes ago
          But we’re being sold an “autonomous saw”. Who’s at fault here?
    • rajayonin 26 minutes ago
      > AI doesn't produce bad software, people do.

      AI makes producing bad software easier.

      • Maxion 22 minutes ago
        And faster!
    • vrganj 10 minutes ago
      People produce bad software using AI.
    • jonplackett 55 minutes ago
      It does seem particularly weird. You’d have to really try to make something this bad
    • 0815beck 45 minutes ago
      ah of course if only they used a proper model
      • johnnyanmac 38 minutes ago
        Blame anything except the thing that makes them money.
    • somenameforme 30 minutes ago
      None of the issues raised in the post/article here even require any particular knowledge of how to build software. Anybody with a basic attention to detail would have noticed them. It's just somebody who simply DGAF shipping to live.
    • 0815beck 42 minutes ago
      delusional bosses who decide that human work is worthless in comparison to 5 "ultraclaudes" running in a loop for a week is what produces bad software
    • tonyhart7 52 minutes ago
      probably use gemini because its so bad
  • xavdid 55 minutes ago
    Wow, that's an impressive downgrade. Not only is the site uglier (gradients, gradients everywhere!), but I could log in without needing my 2FA at all. Shame too, since I found the old Humble site pretty charming.
  • brindleth 25 minutes ago
    The article doesn’t seem to provide any direct proof the new site was vibecoded? I mean, probably it was, but people were writing insecure software long before AI came along.

    Without evidence, accusations like this are, ironically, just vibes-based.

    • Kwpolska 2 minutes ago
      What other reason would there be for a complete rewrite without any sort of security? They had a fully functional and secure backend, why would it require replacing just to redesign the site?
    • gbingles 21 minutes ago
      Yeah we just say that about anything now.
  • mococa 55 minutes ago
    They fired their devs and put marketing people to code
    • somenameforme 34 minutes ago
      I expect marketing types are freaking out even more about the jobpocalypse than devs. While it takes some skill to determine whether resultant code is working, marketing goes by vibes all the way up the chain.
  • anilakar 16 minutes ago
    Humble hasn't been humble since the IGN acquisition.

    Maybe they should finally change name to Edgy Bundle.

  • DuncanCoffee 18 minutes ago
    If you try to log in, it gives you three captchas, once when you input your username and twice when you input your password lmao.

    I removed the automatic payment process from paypal so at least that's safe, I'd recommend others to do the same at this point.

    Cannot wait for some insider to tell us the story of how this came to be

  • origini 16 minutes ago
    At least 2fa got removed. Man i hate this, every single shit wants 2fa.

    Let me do 2fa when i have to pay not to just login to services i care very little.

    And yes blizzard my wow account is not worth anything either.

  • laruss5 52 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • dorkwood 53 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • gabucino 50 minutes ago
    >To start with, 2-factor authentication no longer exists, it does not ask for any tokens to log in, so your password is the only security on there.

    i thought i'd be hearing about downsides?.. elaborate plz

  • aurareturn 59 minutes ago
    Why blame vibe coding?

    It's always up to the skill of the human.

    • solid_fuel 50 minutes ago
      This perspective on vibe coding is both funny and contradictory. The core issue with vibe coding is that people ship things they don’t understand. To flip it around and blame it on the humans involved only after something goes wrong as if the issue is them vibe-coding “wrong” is foolish. The issue is the vibe coding.
      • cpa 42 minutes ago
        It’s never about the tool, but about the responsibility. In humans are those that take responsibility for the tool they use, be it vim or opencode.
      • denkmoon 37 minutes ago
        Most software teams I’ve seen were pushing things they don’t understand well before AI
        • eddythompson80 23 minutes ago
          Exactly, there were always shitty software teams. We should all strive to be that one day.
      • kakacik 26 minutes ago
        Vibe coding is just a really big hammer, what you do with it and what you do with results is still up to humans. Even if this was result of it, fuckup is ultimately fully in hands of somebody responsible (for product, website, clients etc).

        If not, company is not viable and will crash badly soon. Market forces and all that.

      • p00ki3 12 minutes ago
        If I had a dollar for every RoR coder who didn't understand the internals of the interpreter I would still not be richer than Musk because there are not that many coders.

        No one at any company has ever understood every bit of the stack they ship; see all the bugs AI is finding in all the frameworks and libs we been shipping this whole time; oh yeah we sure knew what we were shipping.

        git pull [email protected]:allofit/allthethings.git engineering patterns is what created this mess to begin with

      • somenameforme 40 minutes ago
        For the vast majority of these issues, certainly including those mentioned here, simply testing before going live would make them beyond clear. So it's simply a bad developer likely working under bad management and, shockingly enough, producing a bad outcome.

        LLMs will be an interesting test of the current broken systems at most large companies. You can literally fire your entire engineering team and replace them with your "really smart" cousin and Claude. And that's going to be mighty tempting when the MBA mantra seems to be that cost reductions this quarter are infinitely more important than any potential costs in the future. But of course they're not.

        • bonoboTP 25 minutes ago
          Is it about MBA mantras or simply folks never sticking around in one spot to have long term consequences affect them and their reputations?
      • _flux 39 minutes ago
        So as I understand it, vibecoding means (meant?) that you don't look at the code it produces, you case only about the end results, e.g. website through a browser.

        But in this case, they seem to have skipped that as well.

    • throwaw12 41 minutes ago
      "Why blame vibe coding?"

      Because it allows you to produce so much code that it's not viable to carefully review each line/module, and get the benefits of the fast output.

      Writing code yourself forces your brain to start creating pathways in your brain and you can verify the correctness of those pathways in your mind (e.g. am I actually doing this right, if I have seen such API would I be happy to use it,...)

      Not saying we should write code manually, just showing the differences.

      • mcv 20 minutes ago
        And even if you don't carefully review each line of code (or if you do), it helps a lot if you understand the basic principles of what you're trying to build. In this case, the vibe coder clearly had no idea about account security standards.

        Programmers don't just write code. They also understand why they're writing the code and what it's supposed to do.

    • eviks 49 minutes ago
      Because "skill" is too generic to be a useful categorization of reality, so people identify more specific causes
    • b00ty4breakfast 40 minutes ago
      I'm too old to keep up with the hip jargon these days; isn't "vibe coding" different from just using a coding agent?
    • agilek 45 minutes ago
      There probably was no human in the loop.

      Or more possibly the person incompetent one.

    • resonious 48 minutes ago
      Was going to say the same. In fact we're seeing a huge wave of hacks caused by old human coded systems getting owned by "vibe" attackers.

      Vibe coding is such an overused term now. Stats say what, 80% of programmers use AI to generate code? 90%? So everything is vibe coded. If you do well, no, it's still engineering. Someone makes a mistake? Cuts a corner somewhere? Vibe coded.

      • bigstrat2003 28 minutes ago
        > Stats say what, 80% of programmers use AI to generate code? 90%?

        I am extremely skeptical that those numbers are even close to accurate.

      • johnnyanmac 39 minutes ago
        >So everything is vibe coded.

        Given the sentiment that software is getting worse, buggier, and overall less stable, that isn't a comforting statement.

    • voidUpdate 36 minutes ago
      Because if a human was to program it, they might have stopped for a second and thought "Is this really a good idea?" whereas the LLM just goes "You're absolutely right! Here's some updates to the security code:"
      • FranzFerdiNaN 0 minutes ago
        The human who thought pressing publish on this wouldn’t have thought stopped to think about security even if it was handmade.
      • user43928 12 minutes ago
        I don't think it does, I doubt SOTA models are going to sign off on this.

        On the other hand, people incompetent enough to ship this couldn't have produced a working website if they had to handwrite the code, so in that sense LLMs are at fault.

    • johnnyanmac 43 minutes ago
      how many forced "tokenmaxxing" initatives do I need to bring up before we stop blaming developers for this reckless adoption of AI? These decisions come from the top, often from people who do not understand the software.
    • roncesvalles 44 minutes ago
      Vibecoding amplifies human mediocrity and enables grift.