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points by himata4113 2 days ago | 0 comments

The bad thing here is that modding discord will become significantly harder and might have been their original intention here.

[–] slashink 2 days ago

Hey, I work at Discord, specifically on this effort. Our entire focus here has been about improving performance and making the client really feel great.

[–] Scaled 2 days ago

It's difficult to believe Discord's intent is to make the client great when the recent updates have been to shove Best Buy ads into it. Even to the point of surfacing ads as friend dm notifications! In fairness, I'm jaded since I lost my account due to a sudden ultimatum to share my phone number -- extortion for my PII. So it is impossible for me to believe Discord operates in good faith.

[–] Insanity 2 days ago

In fairness these are probably distinct teams at discord. A team of engineers focused on performance probably _genuinely_ cares about that.

But there’s other teams and forces at play as well. So I agree with your overall sentiment but the SDEs who worked on this are perhaps not the ones shovelling adware into our faces.

[–] Scaled 2 days ago

This is a fair point, but it's basically being proud of making the monstrous privacy-destroying ad machine go 10% faster. With how they pressure people to doxx themselves to them (phone number verification) or be completely locked out of their accounts, there is enough predatory tactics in that company that no one should feel proud of working there.

[–] Insanity 2 days ago

I don't work at Discord, but I know of very few companies that don't have "malicious" tactics in one sense or another. Ultimately they are trying to improve their own bottom line and that _rarely_ aligns with what's best for people.

[–] slashink 2 days ago

Yeah look Discord is more than one person. A lot of us really care about making the most performant client and that's why we did this.

[–] himata4113 2 days ago

Please drop a stripped .pdb right next to the binary or at least make it downloadable :)!

[–] cfbradford 2 days ago

They’re showing how easy it is to vibe code a port of the app. A motivated developer outside Discord could do the same and release OpenDiscord or whatever if they cared enough to want to mod the app that way.

[–] hmry 2 days ago

Discord says using modified or alternative clients is against their terms of service, and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

They're not exactly friendly to that sort of thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they add some traps to catch people making their own client.

So I'd +1 the sibling comment's suggestion to consider alternatives to Discord, if you're setting up your own community

[–] writtenone 2 days ago

So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

[–] 10111001 2 days ago

> So then hide your client better? Just because a company has a policy does not mean you need to follow it.

How, it sounds like they're trying to catch you, e.g. I took...

> and they have banned people for it in the past (if they do something detectable, like enabling A/B testing feature flags that their account ID doesn't match :/)

...to mean they push out changes just to detect the clients who don't conform. I'm sure they could be very sneaky about it in a way that would be hard to "just do better" For instance: have some client behavior change that's hidden behind a feature flag or even calendar date, wait a long time until all official clients are updated, then trigger it and ban the laggards who can be assumed to be using an unofficial client.

[–] sellmesoap 2 days ago

Since discord announced that they would be scanning ID a lot of alternatives have sprung up, chatto and Armada are both looking promising as alternatives, plus the chatto vibed marketing materials on their Dev chat gave me a laugh the other week!

[–] Scaled 2 days ago

I can recommend both Matrix and Discourse forum as excellent open source selfhostable alternatives.

[–] sellmesoap 2 days ago

I like matrix, its like the new IRC for almost real time developer chat, I also do this via Discord but I'd prefer an open alternative. If you have experience running a matrix server do you find the data storage an issue? It sounded like if you federate and join the bigger channels you can balloon your storage pretty fast.

[–] Scaled 1 day ago

I mostly host for myself and a couple friends, so data storage hasn't been an issue. I'm sure at some point I may need to prune the attachment store, but I put it on a spinning HDD so capacity isn't an issue. (You can rent a storage VPS and those tend to have oodles of disk space.)

[–] nekusar 2 days ago

Take a look at Chatto. https://chatto.run/

FLOSS, easy to self host, and works nicely.

[–] toomuchtodo 2 days ago

This is the way, LLMs are an enabler and force multiplier to help you build whatever interface you want on whatever protocol you have to reverse engineer.

Provide it the official client and point it at public api endpoints (or an LLM operated mitm proxy), set it to work to reimplement.

[–] apetresc 2 days ago

There are literally dozens of open-source Discord clients already, both vibe-coded and not; and have been for many years. Nobody needed to prove this was possible, least of all Discord.

[–] uproarchat 2 days ago

Ahem there is also the option to check out competitors ;)

[–] ChocolateGod 2 days ago

I don't see any reason to think the web client is going away.

[–] rbits 2 days ago

They can just repackage the web app and mod that if all else fails.

[–] muddi900 2 days ago

Some vibekiddie will reengineer this, and mod it.

[–] rs999gti 2 days ago

How? Anthropic hard coded anti-reverse engineering instructions into Claude.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

[–] pjmlp 2 days ago

Local AI for starters, stop relying on a single timesharing AI vendor.

[–] techjamie 2 days ago

Hopefully they don't stop it from doing malware analysis. I've been using it to report malware C2s and it's a godsend for pulling apart the layers of crap they use.

Edit: A couple queries with it indicate it will still assist with malware analysis and considers it beneficial. Hopefully it stays that way.

[–] esseph 2 days ago

Open models have no guardrails.

[–] TheGoddessInari 2 days ago

This isn't universally true, and there's a lot of pressure to bake guardrails and moderation in: Mistral for instance went from one of the most unhinged to incredibly restrictive models with Mistral 4 Large release.

Several others have done similar to greater or lesser degrees in calendar 2026, but the pressure is there across the board to limit what the open models can do without modifications that could largely only be found locally and not from online providers.

[–] inknight 2 days ago

DeepSeek + DSH can do it with a fraction of the cost

[–] swat535 2 days ago

As well as literally any other Chinese / open model.

I'm not surprised Anthropic and OpenAI are trying their best to ban / severely handicap competition and crack down on opensource. It's a major threat to their existence.

[–] breakwaterlabs 2 days ago

It may shock you to hear that there are other coding agents than Claude.

[–] abirch 2 days ago

Wait until they find out about Abliteration models

[–] sunaookami 2 days ago

They did not. Everyone has misinterpreted what Anthropic actually did and say. This attention economy is exhausting...

This is what an Anthropic dev said:

>"to steer it away from recreating someone else's specific game"

This just means exact clones, not reverse-engineering. The article is blatantly lying. And easy to disprove by... trying it yourself.

[–] rs999gti 2 days ago

From the article itself, "Regarding the blocking of reverse engineering, we have received direct confirmations. The first comes from our own alumnus Jarred Walton, who was trying to run checks on the software he's developing. He notes that such work had been performed with no issue until yesterday, October 31, and that switching to Opus 4.8 let him continue his work."

[–] pyreko 2 days ago

...so just don't use Claude?

[–] rs999gti 2 days ago

I thought Claude was the tool for the AI script kiddies?

[–] not_a9 2 days ago

Can’t see it on my end, the clanker still finesses IDAPython just fine.

[–] odo1242 2 days ago

Anti video-game-reverse-engineering, to be specific. It’ll refuse to decompile or reverse engineer any video game.

[–] not_a9 2 days ago

Just tossed the clanker at some stuff in Cyberpunk 2077, seems to be reversing it fine. Mind you I’m using my Claude sub in OMP so maybe I’m getting a less shitty system prompt (also I have the defensive CVP which presumably allows a lil more rev work than normal, though it’s still not enough for interesting things on Opus 5.5)

It’d probably be trickier with multiplayer games given the slopmachine would probably assume you wanna cheat in it

[–] TremendousJudge 2 days ago

>vibekiddie

love this term, knew instantly what it means

[–] himata4113 2 days ago

depends if they decide to use any kind of obfuscation here to protect "IP"

[–] odo1242 2 days ago

I mean, why would you want to mod the desktop client of discord instead of the web client?