Please clarify the project's history and the use of Generative AI

[Leniwcowaty]

Hello!

I'm very interested in this project and consider deploying it full-time in production for my personal needs. However, since the project appears to be quite new I have some reservations regarding its history and the codebase. I have found several contradictions in the described history of the project, as well as some indications of Gen-AI usage, clarifying which would in my opinion help the project's public perception and ensure potential users about its quality.

The pace of the development also seems quite unnatural - if the project was in development for years (unclear if it was 10 years or 4 years since company creation) then between first concept and version 1.0 there was anywhere between 10 and 4 years, but between version 1.0 and 2.0 there was less than half a year.

Regarding the use of Generative AI - I am not claiming it was used, but there are some signs, pointing to the fact, that it may have been used to some extent:

1. Aforementioned very quick pace of the development (554 commits mostly by a single user in 269 days means on average 2 commits per day)
2. Commit messages following a standardized naming convention, but with weird modification, very similar to Claude Code commit messages naming convention
3. Comments in the code looking like "internal dialog", which may be either developer leaving notes to himself, or AI chatbot explaining the purpose of the code snippet
4. Excessive usage of Emojis in Readme, very indicative of the writing style of tools like ChatGPT

I am not here to draw any conclusions, or accuse the project of being vibe-coded. I would just like to know the answers, and I think this level of honesty would be appreciated by the FOSS community, and help the project grow.

Thank you, and have a good day.

[johaven]

Sync-in is the result of several years of work. Initially, it started as a side project I had been working on since 2012, and it went through multiple rewrites (Java, Python, TypeScript…).
From the early days, some companies trusted the solution, and it evolved based on their feedback and needs.

Most people underestimate the time and commitment required to maintain an open-source project, it’s not a decision taken lightly. I didn’t want to spend my days fixing issues, so I waited until the project reached a certain level of maturity before publishing it on GitHub.

The philosophy behind Sync-in, along with sovereignty concerns and a growing awareness of these topics, pushed me to open-source the code. The goal is to allow anyone to self-host and to provide an alternative within the ecosystem.
Since the solution has been used in production for several years, it was released directly as version 1.0 on GitHub.

Regarding the history of Sync-in, a simple WHOIS lookup shows that the domain has existed since 2012.
The company itself is more recent, which also explains the acceleration in development.
Open source does not mean there is an obligation to expose everything.

Regarding the other points:

• Conventional commits are a standardized convention that I’ve been using for years. If Claude Code uses it as well, that’s perfectly fine.
• Code comments are there to help understand certain complex or tricky parts (and sometimes serve as personal notes). An AI would probably be much more verbose than me ^^
• The goal of the project is to be accessible to as many users as possible. Since we are French, we do use AI to help translate some content (README, documentation…).
• We remain fully responsible for the code and its evolution. For now, we are quite reluctant to use AI to generate code within Sync-in. Technical debt is a real concern, and we prefer to stay in control. Sync-in handles user files (including our own, since we are also users), so we favor a more cautious approach, even if it means implementing a bit slower on some features.
• However, tests may be generated with the help of AI. They are always reviewed and validated, and they do not impact production code.

It might indeed be worth clarifying this somewhere.