Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

odra.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 263 posts

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

#41

Post by sunnybeetroot »

fwlr wrote: post #12

“We use Claude Code too” I understand that it’s probably impossible to sell non-AI-assisted solutions to AI-pilled companies (even when their headaches are AI-induced), but my gut reaction to “take an AI-inflated codebase and apply AI deflation to it” is something like “that’s akin to applying two rounds of lossy transcoding; the errors don’t cancel out, they cross-multiply”.

Not exactly. It’s more a kin to giving an electric drill to a tradesman vs a screw driver. The tradesman will use the electric drill effectively.

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

#42

Post by dpark »

supern0va wrote: post #24
K0balt wrote: post #11

lol looks like they are using a similar methodology to how we use Claude in house. Honestly, the code we write with AI is cleaner, better documented, better factored, more maintainable, and less bugs than back in old days before code assistant agents. I think people must be just yoloing it, because it seems a lot like a holding it wrong type problem. Documentation driven development is your friend.

Same here. Honestly, there's also a bunch of human friction that goes away. I can tell a junior that a change needs to be significantly refactored (or even thrown away entirely) without the psychological damage of discarding days/weeks of work from them. Previously, I would need to do the trade-off calculation. How urgently does this need to ship, and do we have time to rework this? What are the deal breakers that ne…

> It's de-personalized

I had an interesting conversation with a junior engineer who made this observation. She shipped a feature, we gathered data, and based on data we pivoted to a different design. She called out that she wasn’t attached to the code because AI wrote it. Not that she didn’t care about quality or effectiveness of the product, but the personal emotional attachment to the code itself was not there. Probably a healthy thing. I’ve seen senior engineers defend mediocre code because they wrote it and changing it was an ego hit.

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

#43

Post by i_have_an_idea »

I am currently working with a non-dev startup CEO that's fully embraced Claude Code and vibe coding.

90% of my work is to run code review workflows and steer his CLAUDE.md into the correct architecture choices and away from past mistakes.

So far it's working pretty well -- I'm able to unslopify the code and maintain the agent's performance. And the CEO is happy, he's able to develop his product pretty fast and not hit any walls.

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

#45

Post by senderista »

simonw wrote: post #28

> You have an AI-generated codebase that works, but adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things? Sounds like you forgot to have the agents use red/green TDD and build a robust test suite while they were shipping all of those features.

How does either of those practices keep code maintainable?

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

#46

Post by js2 »

zie1ony wrote: post #2

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…

From the submitted link:

> we distil what it does

FYI, "distill".

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

#47

Post by dpark »

shoo wrote: post #13
quuxplusone wrote: post #6

"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…

If the client has an extensive suite of automated tests assessing if the software is meeting its requirements, it should be possible for them to flush out most regressions within minutes or hours, not weeks. If the client hasn't invested in setting that up, the resulting situation is the clients' responsibility.

If the client has that, they definitely don’t need an external party to ask Claude to do code cleanup for them.

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

#48

Post by simonw »

senderista wrote: post #45
simonw wrote: post #28

> You have an AI-generated codebase that works, but adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things? Sounds like you forgot to have the agents use red/green TDD and build a robust test suite while they were shipping all of those features.

How does either of those practices keep code maintainable?

They solve "adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things".

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

#49

Post by blanched »

thraway3837 wrote: post #39

We replaced a 120,000 USD/year low-code/no-code platform that was running a lot of workflows. And we have another platform that is also similar that we are on track to replace by EOY. Both have been replaced by "vibe" coding. It works well. Everyone's happy. People are having fun with it. We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback. JIRA tickets get created, and we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to…

> we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR

> none of them have read any more than a few lines of code

So what do you / your team do?

Post reply on HN