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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#361

Post by rainonmoon »

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.

This attitude towards exposing customer data as a palatable oopsie on someone’s path to learning (by… outsourcing the effort of learning to an LLM?) is truly disgraceful.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#362

Post by SkiFire13 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #351
randmeerkat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rebuild will likely end up easier, IMO, because the screens and the logic is all done. Most of it just has to be moved to strict backend and then have the APIs secured correctly. How to draw an owl… Step 1. Draw a circle. Step 2. Draw the rest of the owl…

The hardest thing about most business software is rarely technical. CRUD apps are CRUD apps. In this case, it's understanding the use cases and flows that the customers value and where the incumbents are coming up short.

The hard thing about CRUD apps is how to structure your data, which is not something easy to rectify later on.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#363

Post by Sateeshm »

lonelyasacloud wrote: post #318
tux1968 wrote: post #28

This has happened before. Non-technical or junior people developed and deployed applications, emboldened by the relative ease of Microsoft Access and Excel. There were all kinds of limitations, scaling problems, and maintenance nightmares. But there were a lot of upsides too, and it made the "professionals" up their game to obviate the need for such adhoc and unsanctioned developments. Come to think of it, the exact…

Almost managed to forget the horror of all those enterprise "web" pages that worked just as long as the user was on a Windows machine with ActiveX ...

My company still has internal sites that work only on windows

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#364

Post by ygritte »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #345
AlecSchueler wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't actually see the difference. If someone writes the code and understands it but then becomes unavailable, what's the practical difference with no one having understood it?

Someone at some point had a working mental model of the code and a reputation to protect and decided that it was good enough to merge. Someone vetted and hired that person. There's a level of familiarity and history that leads others to extend trust.

You could never have the same amount of trust in LLM-generated code as in a human developer, even if you wrote a large amount of tests for it. There will always be one more thing that you didn't think to test. But the many reports of massive security holes in AI coding tools and their products show that nobody even bothers with testing. Neither the vendors nor the users.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#366

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> But at the same time, he was able to prove out a viable business in a matter of a few months with no engineering background and no technical capability.

Is that your takeaway? My takeaway is that he was able to prove that paying nothing for s/ware development is a viable strategy to outcompete businesses who pay for s/ware development.

I mean, by that measure, I can "prove" a viable market for ride-sharing that charges 50% of what Uber, et al charges. All I have to do is have the drivers drive for free.

> Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up.

I would bet good money that that is going to go badly too, unless his instructions to the developer is "Do whatever is necessary, including rewriting from scratch if that is necessary", and the reason I say this is because the vibe-coded apps I looked at were all very hard to follow.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#367

Post by CharlieDigital »

SkiFire13 wrote: post #362
CharlieDigital wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardest thing about most business software is rarely technical. CRUD apps are CRUD apps. In this case, it's understanding the use cases and flows that the customers value and where the incumbents are coming up short.

The hard thing about CRUD apps is how to structure your data, which is not something easy to rectify later on.

For relational data, nothing could be further from the truth.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#368

Post by [deleted] »

oc1 wrote: post #261
CharlieDigital wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a win for the customers. From what he's told me, there's zero churn so far despite the hacks ( including one where the hacker emailed every customer about the hack ). It's because the software is that much of an improvement over the incumbents at a fraction of the cost. Better features, more flexible, easier to use, faster, etc. Everything about it is better than the two major vendors. The rebuild will likely en…

God, i'm living in a dilbert comic. I would have never thought i would one day envy licensed professionals like lawyers who have a barrier for entry into their profession.

[deleted]

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#369

Post by msephton »

stevage wrote: post #256
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?

In my experience it will follow quite closely to the style of any seeded code. And you can also pass it a style guide!

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#370

Post by lelanthran »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #344
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.

On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features. The customers know there was a hack because the hacker emailed them (I had a test account and received the same email). Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered. I think there's something to be said for that.

> On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features.

He's doing the digital equivalent of drop-shipping. No one is making money at that anymore either, although people did well at first.

Drop-shipping software products isn't a long-term thing.

> Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered.

In a market that is tolerant enough of broken software that they won't churn after getting notice that it broke, it only takes another "ideas guy" to vibe-code a competitor product and take all the customers because they can charge less than he is charging[1].

[1] Because, as you said, he now has to retain a real dev to fix it, which costs money, which will have to come out of the customers., said customers being willing to switch to a cheaper replacement, which will be the vibe-coded low-cost competitor, which will eventually need a real developer, which will raise costs, which have to come from the customer, which ....

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