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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#461

Post by cortical_iv »

benatkin wrote: post #85
cortical_iv wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't get too persnickety about definitions. There are lots of arguments about what 'legacy' code means. you are throwing around the term quite a bit without really giving any definition at all. 'Code that nobody understands' is fine as a quick and dirty pointer. Martin Feathers, in the most popular book on legacy code, defines it as code without tests. This is not a good definition at all, but it shows just how…

The post is trying to define vibe coding , so the definition of things is highly relevant.

I didn't get out of the post a focus on definitions as the main point. I got out of the post a concern about massive technical debt, which is the hallmark of both legacy code and vibe coding. And no, I'm not offering a definition.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#462

Post by lenkite »

ralferoo wrote: post #388
motorest wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was crazy just how fast it was exploited. The internet is a wild place in any aspect of it. You should try spinning up a random virtual private server on any cloud provider, plug in a public IP address,and listen to traffic. Sometimes it takes seconds to get your first traffic from vulnerability scanners.

Years ago back in 2001, I had a /29 giving my 5 real IP addresses from my ISP. Back then, I mostly only ran Linux, but for some reason, I needed to run something on a Windows machine, so started installing Windows 98 SE onto a machine, and set it up with a public IP address without even thinking about it. It crashed before it'd even finished installing [0], and investigation showed that it'd been whacked by an automa…

Yeah, I recall Windows sysadmins pulling out the LAN cable at bootup, installing updates via floppy disks and reconnecting the LAN cable.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#465

Post by Arrowmaster »

rsynnott wrote: post #320
atleastoptimal wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say it was coded extremely well, but nevertheless a more advanced exploiter wreaked similar havoc. Would they still be liable in your perfect world? To some degree the principle of caveat emptor should apply in some tiny, nascent business, otherwise only large juggernaut monopolistic incumbents would have the means to have any stake in software.

Imagine these two scenarios: Your spouse dies in surgery. The highly experienced surgeon made a mistake, because, realistically, everyone makes mistakes sometimes. Your spouse dies in surgery. The hospital handed a passing five year old a scalpel to see what would happen. There's a clear difference; neither are _great_, but someone's probably going to jail for the second one. In real, regulated professions, no-one's…

There is a word for this, negligence. We need to start considering these failures to secure user data as criminal negligence.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#466

Post by mvkel »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #298
mvkel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I would read that study thoroughly.

It had a very specific caveat of "within existing codebases that the engineer was intimately familiar with."

In all other instances, it was not slower

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#467

Post by mvkel »

drysart wrote: post #251
mvkel wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The one tip for quick success that the Human Developers don't want you to know: You don't have to pay down your tech debt if the company folds because hackers leak your customer database and refund all your income.

This counterfactual implies that successful companies that have not been hacked have done so because they pay down their tech debt.

I can name many companies that have Olympus Mons levels of tech debt, and are doing great. Here's one: Spotify

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#468

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

gowld wrote: post #422
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our imperfect world, by the time the government could get together a reasonable certification process the content you're tested on would be out of date. Maybe when the industry is older it'll change slow enough to do that, but I don't think that'll happen so long as there's so much money aimed at disrupting everything and monetising the disruption. Were going in circles far too fast to have licensure that hinges o…

That's what tort law is for. It leaves the details to the experts, and judges based on general notions of intent, negligence, and harm caused. The threat of financial ruin should incentivize against selling malware.

How do you use tort law to keep licensure curriculum up to date?

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#469

Post by serial_dev »

dudeinhawaii wrote: post #263
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…

Everyone is slamming you but the reality is that you could use AI models + a competent developer or security engineer to _very_ quickly shore up the entire codebase and fix every single hole -- getting it to a place where it's comparable with everything else out there. It's really not that hard (and there is already a bit of research around the defensive coding capabilities of tools like Codex and Claude Code)[1]. I…

The only mistake the original developer made is they forgot to write “you are an expert in the field, you make no mistakes and you make your website secure and free of vulnerabilities” at the end of their prompt.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#470

Post by KronisLV »

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.

> Someone at some point had a working mental model of the code and a reputation to protect

This isn’t always true in absolute terms. In many places and projects it’s about doing a good enough job to be able to ship whatever the boss said and getting paid. That might not even involve understanding everything properly either.

Plenty of people view software development as just a stepping stone to management as well.

With reading enough code it becomes apparent that the code quality that AI generates will often be similar or better to human developers, even if the details and design are sometimes demented.

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