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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#191

Post by 8note »

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

what was in this email though?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#192

Post by Arubis »

bdangubic wrote: post #138

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 :) )

Yep. The humorous definition of legacy code is anything merged to trunk.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#193

Post by sshine »

zizee wrote: post #64
whatever1 wrote: post #42

If the code will be reviewed from the LLM of the future, then why does it matter? Let it review a trillion lines of code for a simple calculator app. I think that we devs are now very skeptical because we are the ones that have to fix the sh that llms spit out. But likely we will be taken out of the loop completely.

The vast majority of people cannot do the structured thinking to model the real world in a fashion that a computer can understand. That is a key attribute of a good dev. If someone can do this, and describe it well enough to a LLM, they are a dev. It's not devs that will be taken out of the loop, unless you define a dev as someone who is just a translator between human language and machine code.

The LLM + agentic framework supplements many core dev skills including sporadic habits of tirelessly testing things, spec-driven development (thinking what you’re gonna make before you do), and debugging.

Some devs may have all of these, some may lack several.

I certainly benefit from having a better overview while vibe-coding: I don’t get lost in some rabbit-hole trying to optimise something that is good enough, and my most important tasks are always well-defined before I start.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#194

Post by sshine »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #41
MrGilbert wrote: post #7

And what you will get in return is professional software developers looking at vibe-coded modules that already went into production, stating that "we will never ever touch this", as they don’t want to be responsible for something they would have never put into production in the first place. Now, they see themselves challenged to defend against the non-technical departments, because all they see are some elitist devel…

Asking someone to maintain a "vibecoded" project isn't vibecoding anymore, by definition. I feel this whole thing is going the "AGI" way. Everyone is shouting above everyone else, using different definitions and biases, and there is 0 productive discussion going on. Vibe coding - you don't care about the code. You don't look at the code. You just ask, test that what you received works, and go on with your life. LLM-a…

It’s a spectrum.

I care when it doesn’t just work.

I hardly look when it does.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#195

Post by AdieuToLogic »

0x500x79 wrote: post #141
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 t…

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

This is likely because LLM's solve for document creation which "best" match the prompt, via statistical consensus based on their training data-set.

> 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 many people mistake the certainty implicit in commercial LLM responses as correctness, largely due to how people typically interpret similar content made by actual people when the latter's position supports the former's. It's a confluence of Argument from authority[0] and Subjective validation[1].

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjective_validation

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#196

Post by roywiggins »

YokoZar wrote: post #159
anamexis wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe a blackhat hacker decided that the software was so shoddily built that the company didn't deserve to continue existing, and decided to try to make that happen as a sort of vigilante justice against crappy vibe-coded apps.

Definitely not a good idea but it's not an unreasonable motivation.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#197

Post by api »

doesnt_know wrote: post #119
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…

The fact your friend is suffering no consequences and is able to just carry on is exactly what is wrong with this industry. In a perfect world the creation of software would have been locked down like other engineering fields, with developers and companies suffering legal consequences for exposing customer information.

In that world we’d just be transitioning to 32-bit software and still running MS-DOS since it’s certified. Linux would never ever have broken through. Who can trust code developed by open source cowboys? Have we verified all their credentials?

There are some industries where the massive cost of this type of lock down — probably innovation at 1/10th the speed at 100X the cost — is needed. Medicine comes to mind. It’s different from software in two ways. One is that the stakes are higher from a human point of view, but the more significant difference is that ordinary users of medicine are usually not competent to judge its efficacy (hence why there’s so much quackery). It has an extreme case of the ignorant customer problem, making it hard for the market to work. The users of software usually can see if it’s working.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#198

Post by bravesoul2 »

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 also "worth it" to start a burger stand and make $1000 a day by vibing and not wasting time on food hygiene training or practices. Gotta move fast and test the market after all.

I predict 2030: all sites in most countries will need a license to operate and something like SOC2 certification. Even for your blog.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#199

Post by benreesman »

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…

Your friend vibe coded something that handles people's financial information and/or PII with zero diligence.

This is a no fly zone amigo, that's going to be a hard no from me dawg.

That's not instant tech debt, that's a class action lawsuit for negligence with damages that were I a juror in a trial I would find him liable.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#200

Post by api »

randmeerkat wrote: post #185
raincole wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really want to bring down the growth of the USA's software industry to EU level.

> People really want to bring down the growth of the USA's software industry to EU level. The EU is the only place hiring software engineers right now. Everyone in the U.S. just keeps laying them off.

Some of that is US companies hiring in the EU because the salaries are lower. Source: I know of multiple companies, even on the smaller side, doing this.
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