Seeing many people now attempting to create password managers. AI is making it easier now, which worries me a lot. I've been in the cybersecurity industry for quite a while now and have seen huge problems with password managers, especially new ones that focus on local-first, offline-first, air-gapped (fill in your AI-slop buzzword here), without understanding that's not where the security enforcement should rely.
Every day on HN and Reddit now, it’s the exact same post:
Tired of Bitwarden (1Pass, LastPass, ...), so I spent the last couple of months building VaultSlopAI, a zero-knowledge, local-first, air-gapped, post-quantum-ready password manager written from scratch with next-gen semantic entropy.
...and people are going to lose their life savings over hallucinatory XOR ciphers.
Every single one of them:
- "Air-gapped architecture" (Bro, you just disabled network permissions in the Electron manifest).
- "Local-first sovereign vault" (It writes unpadded base64 to localStorage and calls it a day).
- "Self-healing zero-knowledge enclave" (Literally just crypto.getRandomValues() wrapped inside a buggy Next.js server action).
Can we please go back to letting boring, audited, battle-tested tools manage our digital lives instead of downloading 400MB of hallucinated Tailwind wrappers masquerading as military-grade security?
(Ohh and yes, I’m building one too 😄 except I’ve actually worked in cybersecurity for years, know how the primitives work, and didn’t just vibe/slop prompt the entire architecture over a weekend.)