Earlier quoted context omitted.
In other words, the vibe coders of this world are just redundant noobs who don't really belong on the marketplace. They've written the same bullshit CRUD app every month for the past couple of years and now they've turned to AI to speed things up
Last week I asked Claude to improve a piece of code that downloads all AWS RDS certificates to just the ones needed for that AWS region. It figured out several ways to determine the correct region, made a nice tradeoff and suggested the most reliable way. It rewrote the logic to download the right set, did some research to figure out the right endpoint in between. It only made one mistake, it fallback mechanism was p…
1. Find out how to access metadata about the node running my code (assumption: some kind of an environment variable) [1-10 minutes depending on familiarity with AWS]
2. Google "RDS certificates" and find the bundle URL after skimming the page [1] for important info [1-5 minutes]
3. Write code to download the certificate bundle, fallback being "global-bundle.pem" if step 1 failed for some reason? [5-20 minutes depending on all the bells and whistles you need]
Did I miss anything or completely misunderstand the task?
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/Using...
edit: I asked Claude Sonnet 4 to write robust code for a Node.JS application that downloads RDS CA bundle for the AWS region that the code is currently running in and saves it at the supplied filesystem path.
0. It generated about 250 lines of code
1. Fallback was us-east (not global)
2. The download URLs for each region were hardcoded as KV pairs instead of being constructed dynamically
3. Half of the regions were missing
4. It wrote a function that verifies whether the certificate bundle looks valid (i.e. includes a PEM header)... but only calls it on the next application startup, instead of doing so before saving a potentially invalid certificate bundle to disk and proceeding with the application startup.
5. When I complained that half of my instances are downloading global bundles instead of regional ones (because they're not present in the hardcoded list), it:
- incorrectly concluded that not all regions have CA bundles available and hardcoded a duplicate list in 2 places containing regions that are known to offer CA bundles (which is all of them). These lists were even shorter than the last ones.
- wrote a completely unnecessary function that checks whether a regional CA bundle exists with a HEAD request before actually downloading it with a GET request, adding another 50 lines of code
Now I'm having to scrutinize 300 lines of code to make sure it's nothing doing something even more unexpected.