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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#151

Post by thesuperbigfrog »

genewitch wrote: post #82
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…

We're seeking angel investors for our startup that does this, we train models with "assembly" that does specific things and also complete "programs"; the end goal to prompt and it outputs executables. It's farther along than quantum computing at solving real problems, for instance, it can factor "15". this is like the third time i've mentioned this on HN (over a year.) Apparently everyone else is too busy complaining…

>> It's farther along than quantum computing at solving real problems, for instance, it can factor "15".

Dogs can also factor 15:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#152

Post by Gigachad »

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…

This is why we need strong financial penalties for data leaks. A company that plays fast and loose with security should be shut down the same way a restaurant would for vibe hygiene. “Oh well we poisoned some people but look how fast we set up”

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#153

Post by aussieguy1234 »

I think the quality of the code is going to be based on the skill of the person using the AI agent. An engineer knows a pyramid of doom pattern is bad, a non programmer would not. Engineers understand modularity and seperation of concerns, non programmers don't.

An engineer can guide an agent to write good, modular code, but a non programmer can't.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#154

Post by efitz »

If you vibe coded it, why can’t you vibe support it?

I think the whole premise of the article is wrong because it compares apples to oranges, assuming that you’re going to maintain “vibe code” in a traditional way.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#155

Post by Joel_Mckay »

cookiengineer wrote: post #59
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…

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 en…

In general, bad design patterns and team management are the primary drivers for sick projects.

"[O]rganizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." (Melvin E. Conway)

Keep in mind Conway's law also works in reverse, try running a private project wiki with documentation, and a ticket/task queue with small tasks.

Setting pie-in-sky project goals is just as bad as ivory tower engineers. =3

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#156

Post by ww520 »

Vibe coding can get very far. Years ago I interviewed with a company whose business was doing price modeling on retail products. It was couple guys, who were not developers, writing some Excel VBA scripts and Access VBA scripts. They got big customers. Their system won't scale and was not robust; it's basically a proof of concept. They got tens of millions in funding. They hired a seasoned team of developers to build the real product. The project failed. They fired the team, and was interviewing me to restart. Their POC was basically vibe coding and actually got their pretty far. I didn't join because they had burnt through quite a bit of their funding, they had built the sales and marketing orgs while they didn't have a real product, they had fired the entire engineering team where all the organization knowledge had lost and it spoke of some deep distrust between engineering and the rest of the company, and their offer was completely not compelling.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#157

Post by zerotolerance »

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…

Did he need it to prove a business viable if there were already players in the market? No. Do you ever need to validate that people would switch providers of a commodity product or service if presented with a cheaper option? Also no. What did he learn then, that he can create a partial solution that people might pay for initially (no data on renewals) but will ultimately have to actually hire people to build a real product which will eat at his differentiator (price). Wait until he decides he actually has to spend money on marketing.

The good news is that with each of these we get to "validate" that having an idea still isn't worth much without the ability to actually execute.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#158

Post by gleenn »

ww520 wrote: post #156

Vibe coding can get very far. Years ago I interviewed with a company whose business was doing price modeling on retail products. It was couple guys, who were not developers, writing some Excel VBA scripts and Access VBA scripts. They got big customers. Their system won't scale and was not robust; it's basically a proof of concept. They got tens of millions in funding. They hired a seasoned team of developers to build…

Sometimes you can just smell it when companies are bad. I went into an interview at a company that they were trying to escape out if SAP hell and the two founders weren't anywhere to be seen. The kitchen looked sad. I told myself I'd probably be eating lunch there every day and the founders being absent made me realize they probably didn't give a crap about their employees. Also they had junior developer managing the paperwork and hiring process even though the senior lead dev did the real interview. Definitely a shell of a company.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#159

Post by YokoZar »

anamexis wrote: post #147
CharlieDigital wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were a criminal trolling the Internet for vulnerable servers and found stripe keys... would your first instinct be to refund customers rather than do some other sort of crime? Like what's the motivation you envision here?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#160

Post by gleenn »

I would like to say I did a massive refactoring on a legacy project only to make separation of concerns by making a DB access layer with multiple backends just so I could test it. I wrote not even a single line of code. It did a fantastic job even abstracting between both databases. I was shocked. It then was a huge PR so I had it redo it in a step by step fashion and maintain the tests passing at each step so I could split it into 5 different pull-requests. This vibe-coded project did the exact opposite, it made it easy and possible to fix a mostly intested and poorly organized project far better. You can use this stuff for good SWE practices too
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