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

odra.dev

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

#91

Post by AnotherGoodName »

rustystump wrote: post #73
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 Both have been replaced by "vibe" coding.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…

Press y to doubt that 1k/m using opus… that cannot be true.

It's easy to believe if it's 5x $200 subscriptions.

Paying by the token is insanely expensive. Only the 5̵ ̵R̵i̵c̵h̵e̵s̵t̵ ̵K̵i̵n̵g̵s̵ ̵o̵f̵ ̵E̵u̵r̵o̵p̵e̵ Biggest Tech Co's can afford that.

But the subscriptions are cheap honestly. Yeah they say it's not for enterprise usage but ok whatever. Not paying $10k when $200 gets you the same value (seriously)

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

#93

Post by kristjansson »

> Then we do one week of focused work. Before touching anything, we sit down with you and write out exactly what your app does, screen by screen, endpoint by endpoint

While the whole thing is clearly a bit in jest … one might suggest that if a complete spec takes a negligible fraction of a week, then perhaps neither AI nor consultants were required

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

#94

Post by pyrolistical »

throwitaway222 wrote: post #90

Seems like instead of investing in this, just spend 1k every 4 months and have the latest frontier model rewrite the entire codebase from scratch but maintain things that are non-negotiables (like db tables, apis, etc).

That would require someone who knows what they are doing, hence this service

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

#95

Post by hahahaa »

bdcravens wrote: post #19

> One week. Three senior engineers. $10,000. What your markup on their salaries? For the level of work you're promising, it sounds like they may be at market or below.

Probably will do a patio11 and keep raising as they get more confident to do so.

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

#96

Post by thraway3837 »

blanched wrote: post #49
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?

You know, that question should trouble us more. But honestly we've all asked ourselves that same question and I think our collective response is too nuanced to try to type properly but I'll try.

Tools are always made out to seem like the human could be replaced. We've seen that every time some new technology comes out that some people claim will replace humans once and for all! But this does not seem to be true.

What AI coding allows us to do is get rid of just 1 or 2 parts of the job: coding and debugging. The rest of our knowledge based job is still there. AI just speeds things up because I can now ask it to code something while I go help plan or design something with a colleague. Most of us at this workplace also have a very good eye for UI design and system design patterns, so when we prompt/query the AI, we can understand what is happening. That isn't a replacement, that's more like getting a team of engineers who can do different things all in service of a larger goal.

Our conclusion was that we should not be concerned what search or queuing algorithm or data structure is being used. And to be perfectly honest, and I know that this will rub some in the wrong way, a lot of development since the 90s have been around object and graph management. For the 1000th time, I just do not (and most engineers I work with) care how an object is serialized and deserialized. Just display it on a table for me, why are we spending weeks coding a list, adapter, transformer, JSON/XML/whatever, networking calls, networking nuances, etc. etc. when I just want to get our customers seeing that list and move on?

I don't know if I did a good job covering the nuance, AMA!

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

#97

Post by blanched »

ramesh31 wrote: post #80
blanched wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

>"So what do you / your team do?" Probably the hard part; figuring out what the heck to actually build, talking to customers, and figuring out whether it's actually working for people. Nobody cares that your codebase is Clean and SOLID, or uses $whatever_framework of the day with 100% test coverage.

Yes, I'm familiar with these talking points. I didn't mention clean code or solid or frameworks or anything like that.

However, the poster explicitly said they don't do what you said (EDIT: I misinterpreted some of these):

RE "talking to customers"

> We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback. JIRA tickets get created, and we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR

RE "figuring out whether it's actually working for people"

> have senior engineers review the actual functionality and none of them have read any more than a few lines of code

RE "figuring out what the heck to actually build"

> replaced by "vibe" coding

Maybe my definition of vibe coding is wrong?

--

In any case, I don't have some ulterior anti- or pro-AI motive. I'm genuinely curious why and how a project run this way has humans in the loop at all.

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

#98

Post by coderenegade »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #29
jt2190 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever. Well but something really is something totally new. Github went from x commits per year in 2025 (when AI-slop was already being pushed to Github) to the same number of commits in four weeks in 2026. 2025 compared to 2024 was already something like 15x. It's never happened in the history…

And those of us working in the slopfields will probably be employed until the day we die. Love it.

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

#99

Post by j45 »

blanched wrote: post #49
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?

Manage and oversee the engineering

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

#100

Post by stevenpetryk »

js2 wrote: post #46
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".

parent commenter may not be american
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