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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#221

Post by WD-42 »

8note wrote: post #191
CharlieDigital wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's def a hacker from a the incumbent because: 1) They took action after getting the Stripe key by refunding all customers 2) They drafted an email to all customers after a hack that got the mailing list and API route to send emails 3) Not once has the hacker asked for compensation of any kind nor a ransom

what was in this email though?

Hey all I’m an independent security researcher and I found that you are paying for an app that is shoddily built and doesn’t respect your privacy or security so I decided to give you all a refund. Have a nice day!

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#222

Post by throw234234234 »

dfabulich wrote: post #113

Vibe code may be "disposable," but isn't "legacy code" if it has automated tests that the product owner can read and understand. There are approximately two definitions of "legacy" code that I'm familiar with. One is: "valuable code that you're afraid to change." This definition is subjective. I might be afraid to change code that you're unafraid to change, especially if it's code that you wrote (because you remember…

In the long run that's the promise of RL; build the verifications vs the model. As a SWE we could be relegated to doing what many consider the "boring part" of software development, which is just writing case by case test cases rather than the code/model of the world interaction. The "math/intellectual" part may get rarer which sadly devalues the skill/intelligence part of software development assuming the AI can come up with a code model that meets requirements.

Personally however I've found more luck generating requests from the "code model" rather than generating code from the "tests" at present. Only because tests are usually much more code than the code itself under test (one code has many scenarios) w.r.t. productivity. Everything still needs review, manual tweaking and understanding of course for now.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#223

Post by sagarm »

mr_donk wrote: post #61

Don't you think the next step is a programming language that isn't even meant to be human readable? What's the point of using an LLM to generate python or Swift or whatever? The output of the LLM should be something that runs and does whatever it's been asked to do... why should the implementation be some programming language that was designed for humans to grok? Once that's true the idea of it being maintainable bec…

Isn't that what machine code is?

LLMs work best with interfaces meant for humans because they're trained on human behavior. It's why they generate JSON and not BSON.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#224

Post by stronglikedan »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #67

A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers. What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space t…

sounds like a case of survivorship bias, considering that many try but very, very few succeed.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#225

Post by qingcharles »

roywiggins wrote: post #202
raincole wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah since when prototypes built to throwaway are a bad thing? They're arguably the most important step to build a business. Legacy code isn't a bad thing either. The majority of code that actually generates revenue right now is probably considered "legacy" by the devs working there.

Stuff that you know you aren't going to maintain? Vibe code it. It's fine. The article's point is that if you are planning to maintain something, you've created instant legacy code. Which might be fine, depending!

This. I'm using vibe-coding now to build little utils and apps that I will literally never maintain as they do one job, often a one-time job. In this situation vibe-coding is incredibly time-saving.

I know zero about the code the LLM created, though. I've tried going through it, and it is all well-written, but it's all foreign. I wasn't there for any of its creation and I don't have any map in my head about the layout of the functions or the flow of the apps.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#226

Post by stevekrouse »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #77
stevekrouse wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is allowing everyone (including me!) to make way more apps in my personal life that are very throwaway. I think some folks are doing this in business contexts too. But this is a real game-changer for non-technical folks

Yes and no. If you ship, and charge money for it, you are responsible for maintaining it. Can’t treat it as throwaway, even if you meant it as such.

Yeah I definitely agree. I'm specifically talking about things you're not shipping or charging money for. Just little personal apps for you and friends or you and work colleagues. Internal tools, etc.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#227

Post by majormajor »

api wrote: post #197
doesnt_know wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact your friend is suffering no consequences and is able to just carry on is exactly what is wrong with this industry. In a perfect world the creation of software would have been locked down like other engineering fields, with developers and companies suffering legal consequences for exposing customer information.

In that world we’d just be transitioning to 32-bit software and still running MS-DOS since it’s certified. Linux would never ever have broken through. Who can trust code developed by open source cowboys? Have we verified all their credentials? There are some industries where the massive cost of this type of lock down — probably innovation at 1/10th the speed at 100X the cost — is needed. Medicine comes to mind. It’s…

You, of course, say that like it's a bad thing.

I'll say video games would certainly be worse.

I don't know if we'd be worse off with a lot of other software and/or public internet sites of 20-to-30 years ago. A lot of people are unhappy with the state of modern consumer software, ad surveillance, etc.

Probably a lot less identity theft and credit card/banking fraud.

For social media, it depends on if that "regulate things to ensure safety" attitude extends to things like abuse/threats/unsolicited gore or nudes/etc. And advertising surveillance. Would ad tracking be rejected since the device and platform should not be allowed to share all that fingerprinting stuff in the first place, or would it just be "you can track if you check all the data protection boxes" which is not really that much better.

I'm sure someone would've spent the time to produce certified Linux versions by now; "Linux with support" has been a business model for decades, and if the alternative is pay MS, pay someone else, or write your own from scratch, there's room in the market.

(Somewhere out there there's another counterfactual world where medicine is less regulated and the survivors who haven't been victimized by the resulting problems are talking about how "in that other world we'd still be getting hip replacement surgery instead of regrowing things with gene therapy" or somesuch...)

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#228

Post by rolha-capoeira »

apimade wrote: post #126

All code is legacy code. And as someone who’s reviewed plenty of production scripts, functions, and services written by junior developers, including my own early work, this take is overly absolutist. The problem persists in the vast majority of organisations. You can write articles criticising LLM-generated code, but if you’ve spent most of your career fixing, extending, or re-architecting systems built by others, yo…

piggybacking on everything you said, which is all true: Code is not a science, despite what pedants would have you believe. The annoying answer to "what's correct" code is, "it depends." Code is just a tool used to achieve a goal.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#229

Post by daveguy »

throwaway422432 wrote: post #217
therein wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call that stealing. It is a forced refund. A hacker could even justify it to himself that these people were unknowingly paying for a shitty product that was built like Swiss cheese, time to give them a refund. Another plausible one is "this guy shouldn't be allowed to run a website, I can't believe he made money for it, it is going back". I am not saying it is the most likely case or even ethically justifi…

Refund or chargeback? The processing fees for a chargeback on every transaction could put him out of business. He's lucky they didn't find a way to use it for card washing.

It would have had to be refund. The hacker could t initiate a chargeback from knowing the merchant's stripe keys. Seriously doubt it was a competitor. The risks of hiring someone to commit felons against your competitors just isn't worth it. Especially since the vibe coder seems to be bungling things on their own just fine.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#230

Post by majormajor »

raincole wrote: post #171
doesnt_know wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact your friend is suffering no consequences and is able to just carry on is exactly what is wrong with this industry. In a perfect world the creation of software would have been locked down like other engineering fields, with developers and companies suffering legal consequences for exposing customer information.

People really want to bring down the growth of the USA's software industry to EU level.

Letting another country be the wild west and then cherry-picking the good stuff while regulating the nasty stuff doesn't seem like a terrible place to be for the, what, 99% of people who aren't Silicon-Vally-bigtech-execs-and-engineers getting all those profits?

Even in the US most software jobs are lower-scale and lower-ROI than a company that can serve hundreds of millions of users from one central organization.

But for the engineers/investors in other countries... I think the EU, etc, would do well to put more barriers up for those companies to force the creation of local alternatives in those super-high-ROI areas - would drive a lot of high-profit job- and investment-growth which would lead to more of that SV-style risk-taking ecosystem. Just because one company is able, through technology, to now serve everyone in the world doesn't mean that it's economically ideal for most of the world.

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