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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#301

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tux1968 wrote: post #28

This has happened before. Non-technical or junior people developed and deployed applications, emboldened by the relative ease of Microsoft Access and Excel. There were all kinds of limitations, scaling problems, and maintenance nightmares. But there were a lot of upsides too, and it made the "professionals" up their game to obviate the need for such adhoc and unsanctioned developments. Come to think of it, the exact…

A lot of my work early on in new projects is setting up local and CI validations and rules, practices, reviews, git usage, design patterns / code architecture, etc - skipping all of those will lead to maintenance problems in the long run, whether code is written by a developer (I'm not even going to prefix it with 'junior' because I also suck lol) or an AI. But that validating is carried by the whole company at least. Where I work now we've got unit tests, linters, automatic formatting via Biome or Prettier, visual regression tests, Sonar with all the options enabled, minimum of two code review approvals, locked down main branch, etc etc etc.

Some AI generated code does come through, but at that point it's already mostly alright. Code review is still required for things like unnecessary comments or detecting duplicate functionality (exact duplicate code is already pointed out by Sonar).

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#302

Post by jjani »

woooooo wrote: post #207
B-Con wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You can add Korea to this list.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#303

Post by vortegne »

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…

If I pay a company money and then they leak my data because all of their modern-looking stuff was actually just cobbled together garbage and the founder and sole employee doesn't even know how any of it works, I would call it a scam. Your friend pulled a scam. He should face consequences for this.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#304

Post by AlecSchueler »

QuiDortDine wrote: post #254
apimade wrote: post #126

All code is legacy code. And as someone who’s reviewed plenty of production scripts, functions, and services written by junior developers, including my own early work, this take is overly absolutist. The problem persists in the vast majority of organisations. You can write articles criticising LLM-generated code, but if you’ve spent most of your career fixing, extending, or re-architecting systems built by others, yo…

I see that you're not alone in your position clearly, but still, this is such a strange take to me. Do people not seriously not see, nay, instinctively understand the ontological difference between the difference between using code someone no longer understands and deploying code no one ever understood? I'm not saying the code should be up to any specific standards, just that someone should know what's going on.

I don't actually see the difference. If someone writes the code and understands it but then becomes unavailable, what's the practical difference with no one having understood it?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#305

Post by MrGilbert »

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…

From personal experience, I'd like to add "I don't know what I'm doing, but LLM helps me pretending that I do" coding. And yes, that code ended up in production and caused issues. It was coded outside of the development department.

The productive discussion left the chat some shareholder rounds ago.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#306

Post by phire »

phplovesong wrote: post #295

Did anyone think otherwise? AI generated code is obviously tech debt / legacy / whatever you want to call it. This was the same as 10-15 years ago when we saw that php dev copypasta from stackoverflow. I expect code quality to be way, way worse in the coming decade. Its not legacy because of age, its legacy feom day one. Pure nightmare fuel.

I think most experienced programmers get this.

But it seems like advocates of "vibe coding" will fall into the trap of assuming "vibe code can't ever be legacy, because you can just point another LLM at it and it will pick up right where it left off"

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#307

Post by guappa »

api wrote: post #200
randmeerkat wrote: post #185

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.

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.

USA is bullying europe into buying billions and billions worth of € in weapons and we're supposed to feel sad a couple of your jobs move to europe?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#308

Post by guappa »

keerthiko wrote: post #95
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?

Likely still cheaper than whatever these competitors have spent building their product and then hiring blackhat saboteurs.

That's a very big alligation that would need some more proof than "who else would hack it?"

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#310

Post by NitpickLawyer »

MrGilbert wrote: post #305
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

From personal experience, I'd like to add "I don't know what I'm doing, but LLM helps me pretending that I do" coding. And yes, that code ended up in production and caused issues. It was coded outside of the development department. The productive discussion left the chat some shareholder rounds ago.

Is it much more different (in quality) to "I don't know what I'm doing, but [SO/learn x in 24h bootcamp] helps me pretend that I do"?

I guess I see your point in quantity. I could see how this would be more widespread than c/p from SO. And the results would "look" better crafted at a glance, but might explode later on.

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