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

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

#121

Post by phil21 »

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 Both have been replaced by "vibe" coding.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?

> So what do you / your team do?

This is so funny to me, because I know it's asked in earnest but seems so obvious to me:

They get actual work done.

Programming isn't work. That's just a means to an end. A tool to get the actual job done.

At least in most orgs. Obviously there are exceptions - but the vast economy is not a bunch of software companies. It's companies doing things to build a physical product, and software is a relatively new annoying side quest/cost center.

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

#122

Post by throw-the-towel »

icase wrote: post #117
thraway3837 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

writing code is the actual fun part of the job though. it’s a shame we automated that instead of the boring system design shit.

To me the system design shit is fun as well, different strokes for different folks!

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

#123

Post by evilduck »

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…

Most of the new Github bloat will just be thrown away. Vibe coding scratches an immediate itch and it's easy to do. Once the problem changes nobody is going to update the first project because that's hard, they'll just vibe code an entirely new solution leaving the first to rot until they delete their dead repo clutter or move on from the company and the account and all of its repos are deleted in one fell swoop.

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

#124

Post by zem »

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”.

the claude giveth and the claude taketh away. I could definitely use claude in a tightly directed manner to clean up a slopified codebase (and I would enjoy doing so), you just need to think of it as closer to a power tool than an agent.

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

#125

Post by striking »

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".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/disti...

"Fulfil" is the same way

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

#126

Post by LPisGood »

llm_nerd wrote: post #40
martin1975 wrote: post #35

I guess it was only a matter of time before this niche of business developed. AI is an imprecise "programming" language, full of ambiguity (English) trying to produce precise relationships between different concepts. It certainly works great on small scale, building block type of things, but the more a project grows in complexity, components, interfacing with other heterogenous systems in other languages or APIs, und…

> I guess it was only a matter of time before this niche of business developed. This is a fun webpage, and it feeds a certain bias, but there really isn't a "niche" beyond getting people to upvote it for the lulz. I would be extremely surprised if they find a single paying customer. And to be fair, lots of grifters have done the fake it till you make it act on HN, so someone saying "Oh I'm totally going to give them…

> it doesn't work on our giant spaghetti code monstrosity cludged together in a million terrible ways

That is so so so much software. Further, AI loves to make this kind of software.

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

#127

Post by ed_mercer »

dpark wrote: post #42
supern0va wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Pro…

So then, why have the junior engineer in the first place?

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

#128

Post by astura »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #84
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…

its no difference than US team fixing slop written by outsource company from India. where do you think LLMs learn slop code from?

I owe the first decade of my career to shitty outsourced code.

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

#129

Post by Cyberdogs7 »

icase wrote: post #117
thraway3837 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

writing code is the actual fun part of the job though. it’s a shame we automated that instead of the boring system design shit.

I disagree. Shipping has always been the fun part for me. I have been a DEEP engineer, and I love figuring out creative and deep optimizations, but writing them was never fun, designing them was. Writing the code has always been the least enjoyable part for me.

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

#130

Post by blanched »

kdheiwns wrote: post #104
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?

It's really quite interesting how there are always posts on HN with people talking about how AI made their life great, did it cheaply, made a great product, and saved the day. But whenever someone asks for specifics, the questions are always dodged or answered very vaguely. It's rare that anyone ever even says what their product does.

To be fair, thraway3837 posted a reply on a sibling comment and offered "AMA" :).

That said, I do see a lot of those posts you're talking about, and I think a lot of AI development is way overhyped. But I also think internal tools like this can be a good use case.

Personally "none of them have read any more than a few lines of code" makes me wary, but if it works for them, then so be it!

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