Ask HN: Client took over development by vibe coding. What to do?

I’ve worked on a project for one year now, a marketplace web application for one of my clients. It involves a web shop frontend, integration with suppliers, payment platforms, product management, stock syncing, and much more. I built the project from scratch with open source components, guided other developers on the project, and was leading all the technical decisions.

Last year I started using LLM’s for cumbersome tasks, and since the beginning of this year I started working with Claude Code to implement features. Still, I always need to think about the implementation, and actively direct and correct the bot. As many of you will know, it can speed up development, but I still need to use my more than ten years of experience as a developer. I thought the project for my client would be safe.

This changed when they started developing some of their own, much smaller and simpler projects on an AI-powered no-code platform. They immediately concluded this also must be applied to the marketplace project that will run their core business. I tried to convince them with good arguments that this wouldn’t be a good idea, but failed. Since I am not the owner of the code, and don’t want to be a gatekeeper, I instructed them how to participate in the development with their coding agents.

The additions they made to the codebase in only a week are huge, around 10,000 lines of code. To be honest, most of the features they introduced are functional, but the performance of the application has suffered already. What I am most concerned about is the maintainability of the project and how we will get this live. Before, I had a clear mental model of how everything was built, and I added human readable documentation where needed. They still want me to participate in the project and work on the most critical parts of the application, DevOps and other parts they and their coding agents will not succeed in themselves.

It seems some people are possessed by the promises of AI-tools, and do not have a clear mind anymore.

I’ve lost all joy in the project, but from a professional perspective it might be too soon to abandon it completely. I’m curious what I can do in this situation, or what I could have done differently. Are there more people whose work on a project has been taken away by AI bots?

Why does the client have pushing rights to the repository? I would suggest working by pull request and approve all changes that they make. That's what you would do if you were working in a team.

If you work in a bigger structure, surely there is a product manager that can limit the scope of the project.

I would suggest to the client to develop their own tools that are to be supported by them exclusively while you continue supporting the "official" tools.

Since you'll have to babysit and fix their slop now I would at least 2x my rate.

But realistically this will bring you so much bitterness that, even if the money is good, you might want to search for your next client or a "normal" dev job while working for this client.

> Are there more people whose work on a project has been taken away by AI bots?

Of course, what worked me and what allows me to keep my sanity in my case of project owner coming in and remodeling half of the codebase over the weekend with CC is that I mentally ceded "ownership" of the project code, that is, I'm no longer feeling that I'm responsible for what is there and how it is structured. And there are tests.

Apart from that I can say that I empathize with you because I know that initially it feels awful, like loosing some part of agency and also to some degree humiliating when looking that something carefully and meticulously designed is restructured, replaced or thrown away so quickly and carelessly. What also helps is changing mental model and perceiving oneself as controller who overviews process of "shaping" code as whole, in its big mass, to behave in certain way instead of keeping mentally attached to some part of it because "I designed it".

- Tell them that Claude selects schools for targets.

- Hope that Anthropic's data center is in Qatar.

- Tell them that the core business code needs to be secret and cannot be leaked to Anthropic.

I mean, what do you expect? I assume that you told them that you used the clanker initially, so they thought: We can do this ourselves, let us slowly get rid of him.

Moral: Do not use clankers.