Hey guys, I'm the author of Vela. First of all, thank you for posting about it here, as the project is really getting some traction now.
Yes, the project is sometimes buggy, sometimes very much so. I've stabilized the development branches a bit more lately, and spent a good deal of time trying to polish the experience vs adding new features. I have a stable branch (the default), a nightly branch, and a canary branch (the most chaotic and bleeding edge).
As others have pointed out, AI is absolutely used in this project. I would not have the time to manually maintain a project of this complexity otherwise (I do have an acquaintance who helped out briefly in the very beginning, otherwise it was all me). There's translations, documentation, and the code itself. While I am a professional developer, this is my first foray into Android development. I've been a user of GrapheneOS and FOSS software for many years now, and I saw the influx of vibecoded slop hit every corner of the internet. I like to think you all here are more intelligent than the idiots on Reddit (I lurked some threads over there) who think that just because an LLM was involved means the project is A) unethical or B) just as bad as Google Maps.
Even if you think that Vela gives the same amount of data to Google (it doesn't, I've covered this on my repo), consider the fact that modern Google Maps just straight up does not work anymore without Google services. It used to, and that's how I survived. The fact of the matter is I made Vela to solve my own problems. I hope it's an assurance that I use Vela as my primary navigation app. Whenever I drive, I make note of the bugs I had and try to fix them.
Also, I am reopening my investigation into making this work with Android Auto. More discussion is on Github.
Thanks!