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Vibe coding cleanup as a service

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Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#41

Post by theplatman »

eru wrote: post #28
nickserv wrote: post #17

> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. From what I've seen, I think developers can build just as fast, especially with AI assistance. They may not want…

>> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. > That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. In a startup it's often very important to show traction, and thus decreasing time to market can be hugely bene…

There is a balance between getting to market as fast as possible and avoiding an architecture that will immediately make it hard to iterate after MVP.

The problem is that a lot of engineers don’t know how to not over engineer and waste time. And product/sales usually don’t know how to strike the balance.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#43

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

nickserv wrote: post #17

> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. From what I've seen, I think developers can build just as fast, especially with AI assistance. They may not want…

> knowing full well the MVP/prototype will go directly into production.

If they didn’t think that was happening already, they were fooling themselves.

I remember a quote on here, where they said something along the lines of “If your MVP code doesn’t make you physically sick, you’re spending too much time on code quality.” MVPs seem to inevitably become the backbone of the company’s future.

I guess the service could be more accurately described as “C-Suite Cleanup As A Service,” but no one would hire them, then.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#44

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

emseetech wrote: post #35
nickserv wrote: post #17

> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. From what I've seen, I think developers can build just as fast, especially with AI assistance. They may not want…

An MVP? Definitely not. A prototype maybe, but... For building a prototype, unless you have the discipline to not put the prototype into production and your organization has similar discipline , I wouldn't recommend vibe coding. We all know how hard it can be to convince management that he amazing thing they're using right this moment needs to be scrapped and rewritten because the insides are garbage. No-code tools a…

This is true, except that in my experience, senior management seems to have a real hard time, differentiating between “ship-quality, but sparse, MVP,” and “lash-up, crap-quality prototype.”

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#45

Post by 000ooo000 »

alex-moon wrote: post #32

A while ago, I was having an intense and heated argument with a good friend in the Finance sector about whether AI would replace jobs. I informed him that AI can only do something repeatable, "already solved problems", or what I call "shit kicking work". His response was something to the effect that I was underestimating how many people's jobs were _entirely_ shit kicking work. To be fair to him, my partner who works…

>My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself

Based on..?

>I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct".

Autopilot?

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#46

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

eru wrote: post #33
sltr wrote: post #12

Vibe code has a lot in common with legacy code. Low confidence to change it, low internal and external quality. Also some differences: low age-to-quantity ratio, schedule pressure, inflated expectations. It's most cost-effective to shift errors from runtime to compile time and from compile time to design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.

You can use vibe coding in strongly type languages? I agree that vibed code can often be treated like other legacy code. However is it true that people are reluctant to change vibe code?

> strongly typed languages?

Depends on training data. It's not great at rust but it can chug along in small examples. I do suspect strongly typed languages are more suited to AI if it has the opportunity to learn them properly. The movement recently has been generalization, but i personally think if we want to reach further in AI coding, we need models with language and domain specialization.

I imagine a AI agent trained to parse LLVM and feed itself static analysis output, could reach new heights of code understanding for Rust for example.

> people are reluctant to change vibe code?

I think people are reluctant to change existing code in general. Its one thing for a personal project, but for a collaborative codebase, it's a large investment of energy to parse out a unfamiliar part of the system. "The original developer made sure this works, and it passes all tests, so i shouldn't poke it too much without knowing the system as well".

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#47

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

howToTestFE wrote: post #13

I wonder how many of these vibe coding build apps will grow to massive apps/be really popular (I imagine a lot of them will)... and what kind of security vulns we'll see everywhere because of how it was initally built... i can only imagine that services like described in this article will become a very common part of getting proof of concepts built with AI into production.....

The infamous "tea dating app leak" was (supposedly) organic home grown human slop, yet did this much damage.... We may see distrust for new apps and websites rise in few years after more people get burnt by things like this.

https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-...

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#48

Post by baq »

distalx wrote: post #14

Vibe Coding is accelerating the death of documentation and architectural clarity. Companies are measuring success by tokens generated and time-to-prototype, ignoring the massive, hidden cost of cleanup/maintenance. The real skill is now cleanup, not generation.

The real skill is guiding generation carefully so the generated software isn’t crap. Some people here see Claude code and think it’s state of the art, whereas for best results you need a much more involved process.

It isn’t that different from any other form of engineering, really. Minimize cost, fulfill requirements; smarts-deficient folks won’t put maintainability in their spec and will get exactly what they asked for.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#49

Post by opto »

eru wrote: post #33
sltr wrote: post #12

Vibe code has a lot in common with legacy code. Low confidence to change it, low internal and external quality. Also some differences: low age-to-quantity ratio, schedule pressure, inflated expectations. It's most cost-effective to shift errors from runtime to compile time and from compile time to design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.

You can use vibe coding in strongly type languages? I agree that vibed code can often be treated like other legacy code. However is it true that people are reluctant to change vibe code?

I think most often people have some vibe coded stuff that kind of does what they want but they don't really understand what it all is and how it works, or any confidence it can be made into something useful, so rather than spending time cleaning up AI code they just use it to grasp the idea and write it themselves. Whether any time is saved by going through this process with the AI seems doubtful to me. Sitting down with pen and paper and thinking through things would probably be more useful.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#50

Post by aDyslecticCrow »

alex-moon wrote: post #32

A while ago, I was having an intense and heated argument with a good friend in the Finance sector about whether AI would replace jobs. I informed him that AI can only do something repeatable, "already solved problems", or what I call "shit kicking work". His response was something to the effect that I was underestimating how many people's jobs were _entirely_ shit kicking work. To be fair to him, my partner who works…

> if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from?

AWS CEO had roughly the same thought. Senior devs may skyrocket in price if juniors cannot progress to senior skillsets. Those that stop hiring juniors will have a rude awakening when they need more capable software devs in a few years, and all senior roles are now skyrocketing in price. Hire some capable juniors today to train up.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/aws_ceo_entry_level_j...

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