Live data from Hacker News

Vibe code is legacy code

blog.val.town

201–210 of 473 posts

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#201
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.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#202

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 :) )

Yeah since when prototypes built to throwaway are a bad thing? They're arguably the most important step to build a business. Legacy code isn't a bad thing either. The majority of code that actually generates revenue right now is probably considered "legacy" by the devs working there.

Stuff that you know you aren't going to maintain? Vibe code it. It's fine.

The article's point is that if you are planning to maintain something, you've created instant legacy code. Which might be fine, depending!

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#203

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.

That hiring is by US companies moving at US speeds, who greatly eclipse the growth rate of EU companies, which is the point OP was making.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding has always been that most hackers do it for the fun/challenge/sport of it and it's only a small fraction who are in it for the money. Breaking things is just fun for them and the internet is their video game. Also the vibe I am getting from places like reddit/etc... is that it's currently open season on vibe coded apps. Lot's of internet points to be had for destroying them.

Breaking things is fun. Effectively stealing money (the refunds) is highly illegal, immoral, and malicious. Who knows who did it, but that aspect is just dickhead territory.

I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund. A hacker could even justify it to himself that these people were unknowingly paying for a shitty product that was built like Swiss cheese, time to give them a refund. Another plausible one is "this guy shouldn't be allowed to run a website, I can't believe he made money for it, it is going back".

I am not saying it is the most likely case or even ethically justified but it is definitely not a super unlikely one. Anyone who thinks that's an impossible scenario has not been in the hacker's shoes.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#206
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A reliable, un-bloated OS? Sign me the eff up.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#207
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That hiring is by US companies moving at US speeds, who greatly eclipse the growth rate of EU companies, which is the point OP was making.

I think "innovativeness" is massively overrated compared to network effects and consolidation.

Spotify is European. Any innovative SV companies going to unseat them with sheer pluckiness? Same goes for Meta or Amazon going the other way.

China and to some degree Russia have their own ecosystems due to anti-innovative barriers they put up.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#208
post #55

I'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 syst…

ive been finding that letting an LLM write its own memory bank tends to have it regurgiate your prompts more than keep something actually useful.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why is it unbelievable? There is an entire industry of people trying to find vulnerable niche applications like this. There are bots which crawl the web, not to make an index, but just to find vulnerabilities. Nobody necessarily even had to 'point' anything at this at all, it just shows up on their dashboard one day and they get to dig in.

I would not be surprised if Shodan.io ends up with queries for easily identifiable markers of vibe-coded software.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#210
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.

Nah, that's table stakes for a public facing website.
Post reply on HN