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

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

#11

Post by embedding-shape »

> I’ve worked on a project for one year now

> What I am most concerned about is the maintainability of the project and how we will get this live.

I'm not sure if it's something that got "lost in translation" or whatever, but are you really saying this project has been under development for more than a year, yet no one attempted to deploy this to a live environment yet? If so, it's understandable you're concerned about it. A lot of the times when I jump on projects that got stuck in development hell in order to unblock them, this is a huge thing that gets in the way for teams. My approach usually is to focus on getting the whole "Know we want a change -> Implement change -> Deploy to test -> Testing -> Deploy to Production" process down first, before anything else, together with practicing at least one rollback.

It really ties into everything you do when working on a project, as this process itself basically decides how confident you can be about changes, and how confident you can be about that some bad changes can easily be rolled back even in production.

Besides that, having non-technical people trying to contribute to a technical project, is a great way for those people to unintentionally damage how well technical people can actually work on the project. I think, explaining to them exactly what you said here, that it isn't feasible long-term, that it's hard for you to have a clear mental model if they're just chucking 10K PRs at you and that you need to understand the code you deploy, should be enough to convince them. If it doesn't, you might want to ask yourself if that's the kind of environment you want to work in anyways.

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

#12

Post by piscator »

Pooge wrote: post #3

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 con…

Thanks for the suggestions. I've considered to protect some branches, but in the end decided against it. I was not looking forward to review all their huge amounts of slop code. It would also be different from reviewing code of a "real" developer. Feedback would normally be a way to help each other and improve as a team, and be received with a certain amount of gratitude or at least understanding. In this case, they would not read the feedback, at best they would feed it to a bot. They would see it as a needless obstacle. I agree to scope my parts of the project as much as possible. Then it might still be realistic to continue working on it.

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

#13

Post by totalmarkdown »

hu3 wrote: post #5

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.

[flagged]

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

#14

Post by piscator »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #4

You’re collaborating in multiple ways more than you anticipated. What would you do if they brought in another dev to work on it independently? If you see failure in the projects future due to this, make sure you establish your limits and boundaries and obligations clearly in writing. Don’t get officially saddled with their slop.

If another capable dev was brought in to work on it independently, I think I would help to transfer it to them, and quit afterwards. When the dev would not be capable, I would advise against it. But in this case, it is the decision of the company owners, and they turned out to not be susceptible to any arguments against their decision. They also see themselves as "developers" right now, with the help of the tools they use. Focussing on limits and boundaries in writing is a good point, I will review this where needed if I continue.

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

#15

Post by rwg1138 »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #4

You’re collaborating in multiple ways more than you anticipated. What would you do if they brought in another dev to work on it independently? If you see failure in the projects future due to this, make sure you establish your limits and boundaries and obligations clearly in writing. Don’t get officially saddled with their slop.

Second this.

OP - When it fails (and it will), they will blame you for the failure, not the vibe coded slop. Start looking for a new gig. They're going to fire you eventually anyway.

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

#16

Post by jatins »

Here's one way to approach this: Imagine you work for a giant company where humans would push 10k lines of code per week. In a codebase like that there's no expectation that you'd understand everything. However, there is an expectation that teams contributing code will "own" it.

So if the client is contributing you should ask them if they are okay for long term maintenance and fixes of new code they are adding. If not, then maybe you should discuss pricing changes because now you are effectively maintaining code written by them which requires different set of skills and arguably higher cognitive overhead.

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

#17

Post by piscator »

embedding-shape wrote: post #11

> I’ve worked on a project for one year now > What I am most concerned about is the maintainability of the project and how we will get this live. I'm not sure if it's something that got "lost in translation" or whatever, but are you really saying this project has been under development for more than a year, yet no one attempted to deploy this to a live environment yet? If so, it's understandable you're concerned abou…

The project is deployed to a test and "live" environment, but since it is a rebuilt of a very old project that is currently running their business, we don't have to build in production. They needed the rebuilt because the project that is currently in production is not maintainable anymore because of (ironically) technical debt. I agree it is still a weakness that it is not in production, and it needs a strong vision from their side to invest for one or two years into a project without seeing any revenue. However, the environment does not feel right now, I've not very often felt such a misalignment when it comes to a software project.

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

#18

Post by Pooge »

piscator wrote: post #12
Pooge wrote: post #3

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 con…

Thanks for the suggestions. I've considered to protect some branches, but in the end decided against it. I was not looking forward to review all their huge amounts of slop code. It would also be different from reviewing code of a "real" developer. Feedback would normally be a way to help each other and improve as a team, and be received with a certain amount of gratitude or at least understanding. In this case, they…

I don't know how you could word it, but you could tell them to use an LLM to generate specs so that you can understand the needs and implement the features yourself (even if it's also LLM-assisted).

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

#19

Post by piscator »

ghm2199 wrote: post #10

I feel for you. Its probably saddening to see quality degrade over time. I would say this is a values mismatch, if the client does not care about prioritizing technical debt(no matter how it got created) and that is leading to too much mental angst, I would recommend leaving the project. But before you make that decision, think about what you said "They still want me to participate in the project and work on the most…

Thanks, yes it is saddening in a way. That was my first reaction combined with disbelief. I am reasonably successful now in letting that feeling go, and I try to look for the best outcome, also from a professional perspective. At the same time I want to respect my integrity when it comes to what I work on. It has to remain reasonable what is expected of me, and how much damage in quality I'm able to digest. A PM could try to manage this, but they fired the last one because they want to manage everything themselves. The relationship and circumstances are definitely not optimal currently. Considering this, the best outcome might be to quit in a smooth way.

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

#20

Post by rulesmen »

You’re not responsible for code you haven’t pushed. This seems like a bad client that not only wants to push code cheaply but plus wants you to be responsible for it. Charge extra. Your value is not in generating code but the accountability of the code you generate and verify.
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