Vibe code is legacy code • Hacker News Board

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#251

Post by drysart » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:28 AM UTC

mvkel wrote: post #239

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…

"Tech debt" is a misnomer. It implies that at some point it should be paid down. There are very few examples where dedicating real efforts exclusively to paying down tech debt led to anything beneficial for the customer. Some of the software we know and love today started with someone writing their very first line of PHP code, or Rails. Vibe coding is ultimately about getting ideas shipped faster. Code quality is an…

The one tip for quick success that the Human Developers don't want you to know: You don't have to pay down your tech debt if the company folds because hackers leak your customer database and refund all your income.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#252

Post by j45 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:30 AM UTC

All code is legacy code eventually.

Some code makes you aware of the limited shelf life of code.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#253

Post by brianpan » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:32 AM UTC

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…

I really like the recent HN post "Enough AI copilots, we need AI HUDs" (geoffreylitt).

I don't think it's stretching the airplane analogy to say: just because you can run the autopilot doesn't mean you are qualified to fly a plane and doing so might be irresponsible. Vibe coding (or vibe whatever with AI) too often overlooks the experience and expertise needed to do the thing.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#254

Post by QuiDortDine » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:38 AM UTC

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…

I see that you're not alone in your position clearly, but still, this is such a strange take to me. Do people not seriously not see, nay, instinctively understand the ontological difference between the difference between using code someone no longer understands and deploying code no one ever understood?

I'm not saying the code should be up to any specific standards, just that someone should know what's going on.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#255

Post by lmm » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:38 AM UTC

extr wrote: post #35

IMO, the time of "code as math" is over. No sufficiently large software system that interacts with the real world is provable to be correct like a mathematical statement is. They are all complicated, engineered systems that are backed by a mix of formal guarantees, earned design principals, experimental testing, rules of thumb, acceptable performance envelopes, etc This is what all software will become, down to the s…

> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements. Cost: $50K of API tokens

As my team has spent the past several months trying to explain to upper management, you can't guarantee that the program does what the client wanted just by adding more tests.

If the AIs ever become capable of reliably producing what the client wanted, they will win. But I'm not convinced they will. They might be able to produce what the client asked for, but programmers have known for decades that that's pretty much useless.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#256

Post by stevage » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:40 AM UTC

sysmax wrote: post #241

There's a pretty good sweet spot in between vibe coding and manual coding. You still think out all the classes, algorithms, complexities in your head, but then instead of writing code by hand, use short prompts like "encapsulate X and Y in a nested class + create a dictionary where key is A+B". This saves a ton of repetitive manual work, while the results are pretty indistinguishable from doing all the legwork yourse…

Do you do anything special to get it follow your preferred style?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#257

Post by yashghelani » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:46 AM UTC

As a freelance designer/developer, one of the most annoying aspects about dealing with non-technical clients is dealing with their ambiguous ideas, which they communicate using very general and abstract words. At most, they’ll point to another idea that looks/functions like how they want their own idea to look/function.

I think vibe coding makes that initial conversation between a non-technical client and a technical designer/developer much more interesting. Because, now, that client can first communicate their ambiguous ideas to an LLM, have it generate something visual and concrete, and then communicate that generated thing to the designer/developer. A much better way to exchange ideas, no?

But, yes, relying on vibe-coded code is not reliable.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#258

Post by pmontra » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:49 AM UTC

stevage wrote: post #249

One of my current clients vibe coded an app then hired me to assess it, and ultimately rewrite it. I'm really curious whether that will become a trend.

A dozen years ago a company hired me to maintain an ecommerce system that had been built for them by a guy that left soon after. They told me "he is not even a developer." That was my assessment too. The system mostly worked but it didn't run fast enough to process their daily load. It was a mess but it would cost too much to rewrite. I managed to fix the worst parts, then switched to other customers. No idea if they found somebody else to keep fixing stuff.

They kind of vibe coded that app well before vibe coding had been a thing.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#259

Post by motorest » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:50 AM UTC

JackFr wrote: post #235

eddythompson80 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else would spend the time and effort to figure out you leaked your stipe key to your front end? Sure people have bots to do that, but it’s kinda unbelievable someone would run such a bot on their vibe coded website.

I have a strictly hobby web app that I work on. 6-7 years ago I inadvertently pushed AWS email service credentials to GitHub. Half an hour after the push I got an email and text from GitHub that I had exposed credentials. I quickly logged in to my AWS to turn off the service, to see that AWS had suspended that service because the bounce rate on the 80000 emails sent in that 15 minute period was too high. It was crazy…

> It was crazy just how fast it was exploited.

The internet is a wild place in any aspect of it. You should try spinning up a random virtual private server on any cloud provider, plug in a public IP address,and listen to traffic. Sometimes it takes seconds to get your first traffic from vulnerability scanners.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#260

Post by motorest » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC

achierius wrote: post #122

eddythompson80 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who else would spend the time and effort to figure out you leaked your stipe key to your front end? Sure people have bots to do that, but it’s kinda unbelievable someone would run such a bot on their vibe coded website.

Why is it unbelievable? There is an entire industry of people trying to find vulnerable niche applications like this. There are bots which crawl the web, not to make an index, but just to find vulnerabilities. Nobody necessarily even had to 'point' anything at this at all, it just shows up on their dashboard one day and they get to dig in.

> There are bots which crawl the web, not to make an index, but just to find vulnerabilities.

You can download a few of them out of GitHub and run them immediately, too.