Everything exists in four dimensions (space + time). If a thing “looks good” in three of them but falls apart in the fourth (e.g., it works right at this moment but its continued existence is an impossibility or a hassle—be it physical artifact made from subpar material, unmaintainable tangle of excess code, etc.), then that thing does not look good. Getting a hang of what things look like in the fourth requires skill and wisdom that probably partly comes from having traveled it yourself.
Vibe code is legacy code
51–60 of 473 posts
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#52I think you are not going far enough though: All code is legacy code. So vibe coding's ability to make writing more code faster isn't special because it's code nobody understands: Your hand-rolled code is also bad. Once you embrace the fact that all the code is legacy, then it's clear how writing more code, faster cannot be helpful from a maintenance POV: You are just creating more work for yourself. And no, librarie…
My hand rolled code isn’t legacy code for at least three months. After that I need my documentation to make changes. Vibe code is legacy from day one and with changing styles
If you have good documentation and you're on stable platform, you can go for years without changes (Common in the Common Lisp world). Which is what we called finished software. Just light maintenance here and then.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#53Something interesting is happening. A false narrative is spreading online, pushed by people who know little about engineering, and others who should know better. They claim junior devs are now 10x more productive, and project managers are shipping code themselves. Now, close your eyes for five seconds and try to picture what that code looks like. It's 100% legacy, disposable code. The problem isn't AI, or PMs turning…
One would argue that perfectly crafted code is at odds with first to market. Every company I have ever worked for has just run with their MVP, bolted on more and more, until they find they own the market - then they split into these things called microservices that make engineering easy to understand at a service level but a nightmare to orchestrate into the same business processes leading to the inevitable disruption by the next… MVP.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#54> We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code. Wow, no. Bad misunderstanding of what legacy means. Long-lived organizations all eventually go through tech renovations, where they re-platform their business functionality onto more modern systems. But sometimes, the cost/benefit analysis to that re-platforming doesn't make sense... yet. The pieces of the business still running on the former p…
I wouldn't get too persnickety about definitions. There are lots of arguments about what 'legacy' code means. you are throwing around the term quite a bit without really giving any definition at all. 'Code that nobody understands' is fine as a quick and dirty pointer.
Martin Feathers, in the most popular book on legacy code, defines it as code without tests. This is not a good definition at all, but it shows just how hard it is to define it. This is not meant as an attack on anyone: I just think some flexibility and slack is called for here.
You could easily write an long white paper trying to define 'legacy code', and it would be a lot less interesting than the target article here.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#55I'm an experienced software engineer (20+ years experience). I really liked the agentic coding capabilities, especially Claude Code. In addition to using it at work (data engineering), I used it for a hobby project (that I intended to contribute as open source). It was a new systems programming language built from scratch, including the backend. It was not fully fledged, but it had the core pieces: a static type system, algebraic data types, pattern matching with destructuring, type checker, ownership (pointer capabilities), dynamic scope region-based memory management, lowering to SSA-based IR (including fast dominance analysis), graph coloring register allocator with liveness interference, and x86-64 assembly generation. I did this in two weeks, something I couldn't do by myself in 6 months.
As I did this, I was keeping everything documented using a memory bank approach[1], so that I can fire up Claude Code and get it up to speed without explaining everything from scratch. Even with this disciplined approach, the code base got to a point where Claude would "forget" the big picture and start trying to optimize locally, hurting the global optimum. Eventually, I got burnt out by having to keep it in check every time it tried to do something stupid. I found myself always needing to remind it to check other modules to see how things fit together. I guess the memory bank got big with many concepts and relationships that Claude "got lost" in it.
Also, I realized that I missed the opportunity to learn deeply all those topics. so now I'm back to coding things myself, with little help from Cursor Tab, that's it. Will see how that goes.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#56"Vibe coding" is too perfect of a phrase. It's the next "cloud computing", where it continued to expand in meaning until even Gmail was considered "cloud computing". ("Cloud computing" used to have a very specific meaning - spin up a bunch of machines, do a task, then throw them away. It was built into Amazon's product name for it - EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud. But "cloud" was too perfect of a metaphor to stay that limited.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#57I think most software is extremely buggy and it’s about to get much worse… just today several comments just disappeared from YouTube, did they even get written there? Uber has a whole feature about upgrading to Uber Comfort - it’s never worked once for me just gives an error. Three have managed to not take PAYG top up automatically for the nth time. Google’s UI is broken everywhere, loads of sites including John Lewis don’t seem to scroll on my iPhone 15 Pro Max and the camera still doesn’t work correctly in WhatsApp (macro mode is not automatic) and don’t get me started on how buggy Dynamic Island is etc. etc.
There’s just shit buggy software everywhere now and I’m definitely not expecting AI to make the way we build things better.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#58IMO, the time of "code as math" is over. No sufficiently large software system that interacts with the real world is provable to be correct like a mathematical statement is. They are all complicated, engineered systems that are backed by a mix of formal guarantees, earned design principals, experimental testing, rules of thumb, acceptable performance envelopes, etc This is what all software will become, down to the s…
> guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements
> built by humans, with elegant abstractions
Frankly, I look at both of these options and think I haven't seen either in the wild...
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#59Something interesting is happening. A false narrative is spreading online, pushed by people who know little about engineering, and others who should know better. They claim junior devs are now 10x more productive, and project managers are shipping code themselves. Now, close your eyes for five seconds and try to picture what that code looks like. It's 100% legacy, disposable code. The problem isn't AI, or PMs turning…
In the past I always talked about other devs in different mindsets. What we see is currently a developer fatigue of code that nobody understands anymore.
Usually that was when an engineer chimed in, and made the broken part into something more useful and more maintainable.
Then an architect looked at the codebase and tried to reduce its complexity.
Now, post LLM, it seems we have 100x the code written by devs, and engineers and architects are completely left out.
And that's what we are observing.
If you figure out how to test this, whether or not with e.g. a TDD MCP server or a DDD MCP server (or whatever workflow and architecture you prefer) you have a potential for a trillion dollar startup. We need to scale the efficiency of code reviews, because currently that is utterly broken as a concept and doesn't scale well enough.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#60> We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code. Wow, no. Bad misunderstanding of what legacy means. Long-lived organizations all eventually go through tech renovations, where they re-platform their business functionality onto more modern systems. But sometimes, the cost/benefit analysis to that re-platforming doesn't make sense... yet. The pieces of the business still running on the former p…
This definition doesn't make any sense to me. If code at an org is working, and there are people or at least a person at that company that understands it, how is it legacy? Just because it's been around for a while? At what age according to your definition, does perfect working code that can be improved or added to by currently employed developers, become "legacy"? I feel like you are falling into the "keeping up wit…
The problem with the definition is that if a business has some ancient COBOL code with one guy left who understands it, then your definition would say that is not legacy code. And that is what makes no sense.
It becomes legacy when it is no longer running on a tech stack that matches the future strategy of the organization. Legacy is a strategic label, not an engineering label. There is no age where something becomes legacy, it happens when business strategy moves on to something else.