Does KeePassXC’s blog post on how they use GenAI give you a different perspective? To me, that way of using it is perfectly reasonable.

I’m with you, as a maintainer of some small FOSS projects with very limited time, a lot of these complaints seem entitled and uninformed views by people that don’t contribute any code of their own.

I’m sad that the internet doesn’t seem to make a difference between fully vibecoded low effort low quality projects, and experienced developers using GenAI in a very restricted, carefully reviewed way. Even further, some only use it as an additional code review method. If overburdened maintainers use it to get a leg up on delivering features while keeping the quality level up, that should be celebrated and not punished.

Since OP will want to do a lot of character based operations for the hangman game, she could also consider using Vec<char> as an internal representation everywhere and only converting into String for display purposes.

Telling tall tales about your height? Not a sign of greatness