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Vibe code is legacy code

blog.val.town

411–420 of 473 posts

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#411
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 100% this. Anyone who's run a website or web app for any length of time in recent years and makes a habit of inspecting their logs will quickly realise that they're being scanned by bots looking for vulnerabilities multiple, or even many, times per day. The search for vulnerabilities is entirely automated and will pick up any domain that has a website or web app attached to it. One those vulnerabilities are foun…

>One those vulnerabilities are found, the hackers will pounce ...and work to exploit your code to their own benefit. They don't do this just so that they can refund your customers.

I mean, I can see refunding their customers just for the lols.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#412
Idk, I always felt the vibe even more when I did understand what's was going on. Maybe that's not in the spirit of how the term was coined but still, it's way more satisfying when you can use these tools in a state of both flow and competence.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#413
After 30 years of writing code myself, i am quite happy to let AI do the bulk.

But, especially with legacy code and monoliths with a lot of different conflicting patterns, you MUST check every thought and step. Every change. Lest it goes off and forgets what it was doing because it is stuck rewriting the same code in different ways.

tbh, I think it is fair to say these tools only really help if you are very senior and can smell bad code from the other room ;-) On real world legacy codebases at least. The code is ok and often on par with half the guys that work here, but they learn from mistakes and feedback ;)

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> For relational data

There are other (worse) ways to structure data, you should not assume that a badly-built CRUD app uses a good one.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#415

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.

> 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.

This has been the main Silicon Valley business model for years. Find an existing, regulated industry (taxis, hotels); skirt the regulation via the magic of computers (and contractors) until you become Too Big To Fail.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact your friend is suffering no consequences and is able to just carry on is exactly what is wrong with this industry. In a perfect world the creation of software would have been locked down like other engineering fields, with developers and companies suffering legal consequences for exposing customer information.

The 80s and 90s devs who built our current software infra were, on average, FAR less credentialed than today's juniors and mids who mostly don't understand what they're building on.

Sure, and Da Vinci didn't have an architectural degree when he was designing bridges, but now you need a proper license to do so. Society learns to do better

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#417

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…

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

Was it worth it to put all his customers at risk like that?

He is honestly lucky, the "hackers" could have done much worse, it would have been much more profitable for them to go after his customers via his software than to demand money from him had they been financially motivated.

> Third, the hacker has been trying to inject XSS attacks into app

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

So this is an ongoing attack? He should probably also hire some incident response and get some security consultancy.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't sound like it was worth it to the paying customers/guinea pigs whose data became vulnerable bc your friend said "security? Lol". But I guess that's true of normie-coded startups as well.

The customers know he was hacked because the hacker sent an email to everyone on the customer list. Yet none of the customers left and he's only grown the customer base since then. I think that tells you something: they have a real, painful, and costly problem to solve that he solves for them to a T. > ...normie-coded startups Having been in the startup space for the last 20 years spanning bootstrapped companies to s…

> I've learned that there's only one thing that matters: solving valuable problems and getting that in front of customers.

To quote another recent article: That is to say, it turns out that the core competency of smiling and promising people things that you can't actually deliver is highly transferable.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently only equity. And it only works because has proven the revenue model and found the customers already.

Customers that he screwed over with his shoddy code.

And a developer he's screwing over by not paying them.
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