I’ve posted about AI vibe coding, and unfortunately, too many users of vibe coding are not doing a sufficient job of vetting their code. A couple wallets I liked were Cake Wallet for Monero and Bull Bitcoin Wallet for Bitcoin, but they’re using vibe AI code, rushing features, and introducing too many bugs, telling me their code is not sufficiently reviewed. And you have to wonder what other issues they might be adding in their codebase unaware. So for Monero I’ve moved to using an older and simpler app, Monerujo, that predates the vibe coding phenomenon.
Monerujo is pretty basic, but easy enough to setup and use. And you can add your own Monero node to further protect your privacy. The built in exchange Exolix is very good as well, and much faster when converting Monero to Bitcoin than Fixed Float which I normally use (Fixed Float is not available in the US requiring a VPN). Monerujo even has a convenient street mode that removes transactions and balances, only showing recent activity so you can safely use it for payments out in public given all the security cameras recording you, especially AI cameras that zoom in capable of reading phone screens.,.
For a Bitcoin Wallet I’ve gone back to using Electrum, which is similarly basic and will connect to your own Bitcoin node’s Electrs server for privacy in checking and sending transactions. It also predates the vibe coding phenomenon. Consequently, it also supports Lightning payment channels, but I’ve never tested that as I have my Bitcoin node with Lightning, utilizing Zeus Wallet. Though I’m sure their lightning implementation works well, but just make sure you back up the channel information somewhere else in case your phone dies or is lost (along with your seed phrase).
Now regarding both of these wallets, they’re in the Google Play Store, but I have them installed and maintained by F-Droid, the free and opensource software platform. The one caveat is you’ll need to add the repo for Monerujo into F-Droid, which is pretty easy with QR code. And I want to say that some F-Droid apps come without the Google analytics which is a positive for bypassing the Play Store. Also, I had to manually bypass Google’s warning for Monerujo when installing it, as it was flagged for some reason, probably not signed by the Play Store dev key. I had over 2 Monero in the wallet before converting them to Bitcoin this morning as the price went up (I do this on a small scale to earn Bitcoin to cover transaction fees as I play with wallets and coinjoins).
Consequently, one of the problems with AI is it’s threatening the quality of a lot of software we use, and humans are inherently lazy, so if vibe coding seems to work, programmers aren’t vetting the code well enough, or it exceeds their coding skill as they put out software they couldn’t otherwise write. And I for one don’t trust AI to not put in backdoors or exploitable bugs that could be used by governments against users. And the AI companies are tightly associated with the federal government, and we know Google and Apple maintain exploits for the government… But at least we can go back to older and simpler projects that aren’t caught up in the AI vibe coding world of today, and I think we’ll see more projects reject AI code and keep their projects human coded. We just have to worry about the Linux kernel, though they’re talented enough to actually vet the code.
And here is a video presentation from Thomas Voegtlin on Electrum Wallet, the creator back in 2011.