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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#141

Post by 0x500x79 »

pyman wrote: post #2

Something 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…

I had a PM at my company (with an engineering background) post AI generated slop in a ticket this week. It was very frustrating.

We asked them: "Where is xyz code". It didn't exist, it was a hallucination. We asked them: "Did you validated abc use cases?" no they did not.

So we had a PM push a narrative to executives that this feature was simple, that he could do it with AI generated code: and it didn't solve 5% of the use cases that would need to be solved in order to ship this feature.

This is the state of things right now: all talk, little results, and other non-technical people being fed the same bullshit from multiple angles.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#142

Post by aprilthird2021 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #127
risyachka wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not a “hack” when you have your stripe keys in the frontend. It’s called a skill issue and to prevent these you have to actually spend time learning instead of vibing. It’s literally the same as driving a car without license. Everyone can do it - but shouldn’t.

It's a hack because he had an admin route and API endpoint which was only checking for authenticated users. He thought no one could see the route because it wasn't in a sitemap (of course, everyone could see the route). Hacker found the API route to insert themselves into an admin table (Supabase RLS was not deployed correctly) and from there, started adding himself to other orgs in the DB.

It's a hack because... it's openly exposed to anyone...

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#143

Post by darepublic »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #93
starkparker wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. How much is it costing him to hire someone to reimplement his idea correctly?

Currently only equity. And it only works because has proven the revenue model and found the customers already.

Customers that he screwed over with his shoddy code.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#144

Post by dimal »

dfabulich wrote: post #113

Vibe code may be "disposable," but isn't "legacy code" if it has automated tests that the product owner can read and understand. There are approximately two definitions of "legacy" code that I'm familiar with. One is: "valuable code that you're afraid to change." This definition is subjective. I might be afraid to change code that you're unafraid to change, especially if it's code that you wrote (because you remember…

Have you seen the tests that LLMs write if you just vibe code it and don't pay attention? They're generally worse than worthless. They test pointless stuff and they miss important stuff. If you have them on a tight leash, then you can get some useful tests, but then that's not vibe coding.

> But watch out, because sometimes the LLMs try to delete tests that are hard to pass. If vibe-coding means reading no code, not even the tests, then, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time. But if it means "only reading the tests and not reading the application code," then vibe coding works pretty well, actually.

Yeah, vibe coding means plowing forward with whatever the LLM does without understanding it. That's the definition. If you're using your brain, you're not vibe coding.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#145

Post by pphysch »

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…

"all computer engineering will be replaced by software"

"all code will be generated by compilers from basic prose"

"enterprise software will be trivialized by simple SQL prompts that anyone can write"

...

The progress is so unreliable, there is doubt left in me.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#146

Post by sidewndr46 »

JohnMakin wrote: post #6
pyman wrote: post #2

Something 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…

Even thinking outside of product view point - speaking technically, I can't think of anything worse than junior dev's or PM's determining what they want technology-wise. At least once a week in my entire career I've had to shoot down awful ideas because they would be unnecessarily risky, won't possibly scale beyond minor use case, etc. I would hazard a guess it's going to be extremely profitable being a consultant in…

I've worked on projects where each feature had its own unique part of the technology stack. To the point that multiple databases were used for one application.

I imagine 'vibe coded' applications to be similar to this but even worse.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#147

Post by anamexis »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #134
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…

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

I don't see how any of that implies that an incumbent did it.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#149

Post by PessimalDecimal »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #118
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…

This must be how physicists feel when people start spouting Rogan-esque quantum mechanics nonsense.

As someone trained in physics, this is actually a pretty good comparison.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#150

Post by the_af »

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…

What he built was, almost by definition, a prototype.

The problem is that, as it often happens, the prototype was then deployed to production. In this case, it was partly the fault of your non-technical friend who didn't know better, but software engineering history shows us this sometimes happens because of customer/boss pressure.

So it's often the case prototypes designed to prove feasibility or to demo to customers become production software, and AI makes this undesirable result even more frictionless.

It seems in our line of business we are doomed to repeat past mistakes -- forever.

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