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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#291

Post by Ekaros »

sublinear wrote: post #287
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 think you're describing fraud. Of course it's easy to start a business if you're cutting every corner with no regard for the users until you get caught. Vibe coding is going to bring upon regulation, which is the opposite of the lower barrier to entry people want it to be.

Seems like EU's CRA does not go far enough. This quality of products should not be sold in the first place. So I hope we will very soon regulate also them.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#292

Post by esulteric »

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…

> it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment

I don't think he proved that. In fact the point of the story seems to be the opposite: even if you have a nice looking demo that does the thing, there is a lot of unseen cost to bringing it up to production spec that has to be accounted for.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#293

Post by esulteric »

pishpash wrote: post #276
Frieren wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let's say it was coded extremely well, but nevertheless a more advanced exploiter wreaked similar havoc. A doctor kills a patient because malpractice. Could that patient have died anyway if the patient had a more critical condition ? That is a non sequitur argument. > Would they still be liable in your perfect world? Yes. The doctor would be liable because did not meet the minimum quality criteria. In the same way…

Yes, parent is arguing like, what if medical licensing protects the juggernaut hospitals at the expense of the street corner quack?

"Skip surgery by getting stabbed in an alley. Doctors hate this weird little trick!"

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#294

Post by esulteric »

willjp wrote: post #262
rainonmoon wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not a viable business, it’s a walking liability. Besides which, why would anyone trust your friend (as an investor or customer) ever again when they’ve shown such profound disregard for user data and their IP? If your metric of success is “I have no idea what I’m doing and still made money from it” your friend would have a better time starting a podcast.

> I have no idea what I’m doing and still made money from it I feel like this describes most people that start their own business at first. It just usually isn’t a lack of experience in producing the product. It’s a constant tradeoff of what skill to invest more time into to keep it afloat. They’ll learn sooner or later.

Entrepreneurship is search. The vast majority of new businesses fail and this is the unacknowledged truth.

It's just search, and most people who try will discover ways to fail, not to succeed.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#295

Post by phplovesong »

Did anyone think otherwise? AI generated code is obviously tech debt / legacy / whatever you want to call it. This was the same as 10-15 years ago when we saw that php dev copypasta from stackoverflow.

I expect code quality to be way, way worse in the coming decade. Its not legacy because of age, its legacy feom day one. Pure nightmare fuel.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#296

Post by esulteric »

delifue wrote: post #281
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…

An interesting point is that if you ask AI to security audit a codebase it can find the vulnerabilities. But the AI "forget security" when writing new features. This is probably caused by training data and RL.

Using LLMs to code is rapidly converging into "programming with natural language" with all drawbacks Dijkstra foresaw and none of the magic big tech promised.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#297

Post by precompute »

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…

It definitely wasn't worth it, and the only reason it got off the ground was because of the current default expectation of human-written software being somewhat reliable and mostly safe from exploits of this kind.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#298

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

> Vibe coding is ultimately about getting ideas shipped faster.

Studies show that using LLMs for coding results in negative net productivity gains on average.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#299

Post by shakna »

RogerL wrote: post #216
0xEF wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reliable, un-bloated OS? Sign me the eff up.

Go check out VxWorks or the like. only 20K a seat, build tools at a similar price, and then oh joy, runtime licenses required to deploy the sw you wrote. Which are reasonable prices when lives are at risk. Yes, I know RTOS are not general purpose, this is NOT apples to apples, but that is what that kind of reliability, testing, safety certification, etc. costs.

Or QNX for the price of Windows, for a certified UNIX.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#300

Post by phatskat »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #120
WD-42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not default to assuming it was his competitors, that sounds like scapegoating to deflect responsibility. What most likely happened is his site was scanned by one of the increasingly sophisticated exploit crawlers (anyone who runs an internet facing site and can view traffic knows what I'm talking about). His site got flagged as vulnerable, the hacker found out it was built like swiss cheese and had fun with i…

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.

> Who else would spend the time and effort to figure out you leaked your stipe key to your front end?

In high school in the early 2000’s, I ran a small Apache server from my home that was basically Geocities but even less discoverable - I used it to learn PHP, SQL, and frontend. One day my log started filling rapidly as someone effectively ddos’d my home server. If they’d bothered to actually poke, they likely would’ve been able to exploit it relatively quickly even without all of today’s tools. I imagine the process of discovery and exploitation is magnitudes more impressive and performant today.

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