We charge $10k a week to delete AI-generated code

Creator here,

There is a new kind of task for software engineers these days. A client calls, asks for a "small refactor," and sends you 100k lines of AI-generated spaghetti.

And this is great! This is something we can work with.

Any experienced engineer can look at a codebase like that and quickly see what to refactor, where a library replaces a few thousand hand-rolled lines, and what smells bad. Removing the first 30% is easy. The next 30% is harder, and that is exactly what the price should be on: doing what others can't. We use coding agents too, of course, but as a tool, not as the driving force.

That is why we started Slopfix, a software house focused entirely on refactoring AI-generated codebases. We commit to a reduction target up front, and the client pays in proportion to how much of it we hit. We get paid to delete code.

I am sharing this because cleaning up after agents with 1M token context is a real business for engineers. Curious what HN thinks.

I want it be positive, but it’s a bit hard with this one. Do you expect the client to sit down and explain every detail? If they know how to do that, they wouldn’t be having messy code base as the one the post is describing.

And let’s say you’ve been hired, what happens after that? You think Claude.md file is sufficient to progress from that point?

The problem is real, but the solution is a fantasy.

"Two weeks of warranty" jumped out at me. That's like "you have two weeks to find the thing we broke, or else we aren't responsible for it." In my experience, a good bug can hide for months more than two weeks! My codebases are definitely not in the target demographic for this service, though, and maybe if I were in the target group (bunch of LLM slop, trying to dig out of the hole, presumably no shipping product or existing userbase yet) the proposition would appeal to me.

I don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever.

A common way to market to these firms is to be very easy to find when their software starts to have serious issues.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/

>I am sharing this because cleaning up after agents with 1M token context is a real business for engineers. Curious what HN thinks.

Its the same as it ever was. Cleaning up after cloud migrations, cleaning up after crypto integrations, cleaning up after LLM tokenmaxxing. I think people are deluded if they tell you LLMs will replace humans.