scaldingly hot tea
News like the data leak of the Tea app reinforce my decision to be critical about the apps and services I sign up to.
Most things I use don’t need an app to always be on my phone and have a lot more permissions and insight than a website - so I’m fine just using the browser version. It doesn’t have one? Then I will be fine not using it at all. It probably is just a “nice to have”, not a must, and can and was done through other means. Just look at the concept of that Tea app; as if that wasn’t just a collection of publicly available advice and “Are we dating the same guy” Facebook groups. We can find ways to make that work that involve neither of these companies. Women’s safety as a monetization scheme1? Weird. Their identification/verification process? Super weird.
I fear we will hear news like that more often as the glamorization of entrepreneurship and AI mix to produce helpless creators and unsafe products.
Becoming the CEO of your own business and not working for anyone else has been pushed so hard online as the biggest goal for years now. Day in and day out, people are inundated with side-hustling and entrepreneur shit on their feeds, whether it’s MLMs, scalping, influencing, podcasts, selling courses or vibecoding multiple slop apps in the hopes that one sticks. So many are waiting for their big break to become rich and independent with one moneymaker product, no matter what.
The entitlement to reach this in some people is concerning. They’ll do anything to cut corners and pump stuff out because they know the more they release, the likelier it is that one will make it, or the slight success of some combined is enough. With AI, the hurdles to create and release something have never been lower, but not in a good way: People don’t understand how their own product works or just create wrappers for ChatGPT, don’t care if it works well at all, don’t care about safety, don’t know or care to maintain it and are surely not well-equipped to handle customer support and legal requests.
Good example for this phenomenon is one blog post that absolutely took my socks off in how brazenly it admitted to just pumping out slop for the chance of money irrespective of good user experience, passion for the product and understanding for what you created. Nothing personal against the blogger (who seems to at least have previous programming experience and doesn’t let the AI generate stuff completely unchecked), but business-wise and from the outside, it looks absolutely horrible and I’d be scared to give you and your apps access to my phone, especially the camera, and especially my health data.
I want to use the services of people who had a problem, spent time solving it, decided to make it available to others and know the ins and outs of it, ready to answer questions and improve it; who are passionate about what they created and why and whose success comes from genuine quality.
I don’t want to use the products of people who saw a grift and wanted to get in on it out of FOMO and greed, who don’t use their own products and have no interest in them beyond pressing a button that makes them. Who feel no responsibility about what the user ends up doing with it.
Let’s say your wrapper app says that plant is edible and it isn’t, do you feel responsible? Or are you going to say “Well I had nothing to do with this, it was the AI!”? There is no good reason why I should give you my data or my money for such a lazy and irresponsible work, no matter how successful some grifters online are conning people into thinking it’s high-quality and dependable. You are neither deserving nor equipped to handle it. Truly, I feel like lots of good people get caught up in watching unethical people and their products repeatedly win online and it’s sad.
I have no idea whether AI/vibecoding was involved in the creation of the Tea app and how much, but the results are the same. The time of apps is probably over for good, and you should be wary about installing just about anything and sending your email address, password and ID to people who may or may not have just vibecoded the whole thing. It has never been easier to be responsible for a product or company without having the necessary personal qualifications to be.
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Published 26 Jul, 2025
It was/is “free”. But you know…↩