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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#131

Post by CharlieDigital »

dashdotme wrote: post #121
CharlieDigital wrote: post #67

A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers. What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space t…

> Was it worth it? Yes, it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment. This feels like less of a win for the customers though. They're paying money and exposing their data insecurely, all for a product that maybe does what it's trying to do. > Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up. This is going to be way harder than it sounds... I'm all…

It's a win for the customers. From what he's told me, there's zero churn so far despite the hacks (including one where the hacker emailed every customer about the hack).

It's because the software is that much of an improvement over the incumbents at a fraction of the cost. Better features, more flexible, easier to use, faster, etc. Everything about it is better than the two major vendors.

The rebuild will likely end up easier, IMO, because the screens and the logic is all done. Most of it just has to be moved to strict backend and then have the APIs secured correctly.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#133

Post by bigcat12345678 »

Great analogy!

It's very true that any vibe code is immediately legacy after they are generated. In other words, they are incarnations of foreign minds, things from a realm that is shuttered from my access, and they are giant pile of code that is beyond immediate recognition to any human engineers.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#134

Post by CharlieDigital »

WD-42 wrote: post #110
CharlieDigital wrote: post #67

A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers. What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space t…

I would not default to assuming it was his competitors, that sounds like scapegoating to deflect responsibility. What most likely happened is his site was scanned by one of the increasingly sophisticated exploit crawlers (anyone who runs an internet facing site and can view traffic knows what I'm talking about). His site got flagged as vulnerable, the hacker found out it was built like swiss cheese and had fun with i…

It's def a hacker from a the incumbent because:

1) They took action after getting the Stripe key by refunding all customers

2) They drafted an email to all customers after a hack that got the mailing list and API route to send emails

3) Not once has the hacker asked for compensation of any kind nor a ransom

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#135

Post by darepublic »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #120
WD-42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not default to assuming it was his competitors, that sounds like scapegoating to deflect responsibility. What most likely happened is his site was scanned by one of the increasingly sophisticated exploit crawlers (anyone who runs an internet facing site and can view traffic knows what I'm talking about). His site got flagged as vulnerable, the hacker found out it was built like swiss cheese and had fun with i…

Who else would spend the time and effort to figure out you leaked your stipe key to your front end? Sure people have bots to do that, but it’s kinda unbelievable someone would run such a bot on their vibe coded website.

Shame on this dude.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#136

Post by wrs »

xorcist wrote: post #103
CharlieDigital wrote: post #67

A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers. What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space t…

Will his customers trust him a second time though?

Most customers just don’t care that much, and if it’s a viable business, even losing all the initial customers won’t matter. This is why we are where we are with respect to basic security.

(E.g., early Dropbox went four hours accepting any password for any account, and shortly thereafter somebody got about 30 million of their passwords, and they’re doing just fine.)

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#137

Post by 0x500x79 »

code_runner wrote: post #108
matt_cogito wrote: post #97

All production code will be written by AI. The question is not if. It is WHEN. What we are seeing right in front of our eyes is how the boundaries of what is possible in the realm of software programming has gone from AI/LLMs poorly writing simple scripts, to being able to "zero-shoot" and "vibe code" a complex system, with a set of instructions written in natural language. What we might be seeing in 2025 is how prog…

I’m also surprised at the progress but don’t quite share the “AI is doing a good job” perspective. It’s fine. Some things it’s awful at. The more you know about what you’re asking for the worse the result in my opinion. That said a lot of my complaints are out of date apis being referenced and other little nuisances. If ai is writing the code, why did we even need an ergonomic api update in the first place. Maybe api…

LLMs are doing a great job at generating syntactically correct output related to the prompt or task at hand. The semantics, hierarchy, architecture, abstraction, security, and maintainability of a code base is not being handled by LLMs generating code.

So far, the syntax has gotten better in LLMs. More tooling allows for validation of the syntax even more, but all those other things are still missing.

I feel like my job is still safe: but that of less experienced developers is in jeopardy. We will see what the future brings.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#138

Post by bdangubic »

I have been SWE for almost three decades now - have read all the comments in this post and almost every negative comment about vibe coding holds true about almost every single ‘human-coded’ codebase I’ve ever seen ( some notable exceptions of course :) )

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#139

Post by aprilthird2021 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #67

A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers. What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space t…

It's honestly a bit depressing to see you say that it was worth it to make money with little investment even though it cost the users the loss of their personal data and privacy and probably put the business creator in legal turmoil.

It's only possible for you to say that because you know that the financial incentive is tipped towards vibe coders who don't care about security vs towards consumers...

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#140

Post by Izkata »

mr_donk wrote: post #61

Don't you think the next step is a programming language that isn't even meant to be human readable? What's the point of using an LLM to generate python or Swift or whatever? The output of the LLM should be something that runs and does whatever it's been asked to do... why should the implementation be some programming language that was designed for humans to grok? Once that's true the idea of it being maintainable bec…

> Don't you think the next step is a programming language that isn't even meant to be human readable?

Malbolge is a couple of decades old. Apparently the first working "Hello World" was made by a genetic algorithm.

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