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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

#211

Post by zie1ony »

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.

Being honest, knocking one refactor after another is super intense and we would burn out quickly. To me refactoring/reading/reviewing a code that you have never seen is one of the hardest thing to do for a software developer. If I have 4 such projects a month, I'd just hire more people and allow them to rest. Also invest more into internal tooling to speed things up would be good solution to remove some burden. I think $10,000 for refactor is a fair price.

We also have other gigs and ongoing project, where we can rest a bit.

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

#212

Post by zie1ony »

kristianc wrote: post #21
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.

They're all based in Poland, so it's probably fairly generous compared to European market.

true

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

#213

Post by ____mr____ »

socratic_weeb wrote: post #202
____mr____ wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaningful difference is that you will not experience EOS if (when) anthropic/openai/etc fails to become profitable and is no longer subsidized by capital funding. While "vibe-coded" apps do help lots of people who didnt have the time/money/skills to create their projects, you should be aware that currently the compute is being subsidized so that users become reliant/used to the service.

I believe vibe coding in general is a bad business strategy whether you use FOSS models or not because it means your product probably doesn't have any "secret sauce" (leaving code maintainability problems aside). By that I mean a carefully researched innovation that gives the edge to your product. Nevertheless, using FOSS models is clearly better for the reason you mentioned. I believe serious businesses will transit…

You can inject "secret sauce" through your domain knowledge or life experience.

You could vibe code the "tedium" out of your app with little to no care about it using AI while paying close attention to the critical aspects of your product. Of course, the fact that all of your AI code usage is being monitored by the company that provides you the model/harness is also still means they can just steal your product whenever they want

Stricter use would remove the primary benefit while not really giving much upside so I don't think companies will move in this direction

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

#214

Post by zie1ony »

sirnicolaz wrote: post #192

One week to both refactor a big code base and also make sure everything works as expected? Not the estimate I would expect from a senior analyst, too optimistic. Fine that you fix the regressions for free, but the last thing I want is a one-week refractory going to production and fire fighting later.

I have 15+ years of experience in software development. The hardest thing I had to learn recently is that paring with AI changes the definition of "what is hard". You can decomposit a refactor into a steps of two kinds:

1. Conceptually hard, which you have to really think about and write code by hand for AI to follow,

2. Time consuming that follows patterns.

Then you do 1. review with AI what are implications on the codebase. Next you crate list of task for 2. and keep reviewing outcomes.

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

#215

Post by zie1ony »

hahahaa wrote: post #92
scritty-dev wrote: post #86

I charge $15k a week to fix any AI code that they fix that then needs to be fixed.

I charge $100k to tell them they never needed the code and delete it all.

See this: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1tb7edc/inherit...

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

#216

Post by zie1ony »

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…

This is a fair point. But these days bugs are not so scary anymore, so a client can vibecode a fix faster then getting me to fix it. Of course if Opus can't figure it out, I would always try to help. I have never left a client alone, warranty or not. This is just how I was raised.

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

#217

Post by zie1ony »

dpark wrote: post #47
shoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless tests are also vibecoded.

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

#218

Post by zie1ony »

argee wrote: post #51

> One week. Three senior engineers. $10,000. We commit to a reduction target up front, and you pay in proportion to how much of it we hit. Commitment ain't what it used to be.

15 years ago it was always fix price for undefined amount of work, 10 years ago it was agile where client was promissed something but paid per day.

I prefer the old way of doing things: do the offer for free, commit to a task, and accept, that it might not be a success after all. I'd just loose a week of work, but probably learn a lot.

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

#219

Post by sirnicolaz »

zie1ony wrote: post #214
sirnicolaz wrote: post #192

One week to both refactor a big code base and also make sure everything works as expected? Not the estimate I would expect from a senior analyst, too optimistic. Fine that you fix the regressions for free, but the last thing I want is a one-week refractory going to production and fire fighting later.

I have 15+ years of experience in software development. The hardest thing I had to learn recently is that paring with AI changes the definition of "what is hard". You can decomposit a refactor into a steps of two kinds: 1. Conceptually hard, which you have to really think about and write code by hand for AI to follow, 2. Time consuming that follows patterns. Then you do 1. review with AI what are implications on the…

This does still not include any QA. The fact that A.I. tells you the implications of your changes does not take away the effort and time you need to verify the correctness end to end

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

#220

Post by zie1ony »

kristjansson wrote: post #93

> 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

This prepartion is on us, but yes, client pays for the time he/she spends with us. You can't cut corners here, as human to human interaction is essential. During the whole process, client might be dragged into the developemnt to clarify things, or decide on some tradeoffs. No free lunch here as well.
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