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Vibe coding cleanup as a service

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Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#51

Post by alex_suzuki »

eru wrote: post #30
yoz-y wrote: post #27

In my experience vibe coding is useful at the very beginning of a project (especially if the tooling selected does not have a boiler late generation) and at the very end when a lot of the work is refactoring. YMMV but I’d rather build the MVP without much AI but then clean it up using it.

Our 'vibe coding' tools are still getting better very quickly. And you would expect that, even if core LLM progress stopped. So I suspect we will get AI-assisted vibe coding cleanup very quickly. Our (new) AIs will help us solve problems that we wouldn't have without our (old) AIs.

Nvidia likes this future.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#52

Post by mhfu »

scorpioxy wrote: post #10

I have been taking on "rescue" projects for a while through my business. Previously, the barely-functioning code was usually being generated via outsourcing agencies but it seems the new source is now going to be LLMs. I imagine it will be the same set of issues really. Just a different way of cost cutting measures. There can be good reasons to take shortcuts but, in my experience, the problems start when you're not…

I was thinking of doing something like that, but how does it work for the company in the end? If they vibe coded their project and now have shitty code full of bugs, you come in, fix the bugs and organize the code better and that's it? How do they continue to maintain it if they didn't have the knowledge to set it up in the first place?

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#53

Post by ben30 »

This mirrors exactly what we learned from outsourcing over the past two decades. The successful teams weren’t those with the best offshore developers - they were the ones who mastered writing unambiguous specifications.

AI coding has the same bottleneck: specification quality. The difference is that with outsourcing, poor specs meant waiting weeks for the wrong thing. With AI, poor specs mean iterating indefinitely on the wrong thing.

The irony is that AI is excellent at helping refine specifications - identifying ambiguities, expanding requirements, removing assumptions. The specification effectively IS the code, just in human language instead of syntax.

Teams that struggled with distributed development are repeating the same mistakes with AI. Those who learned specification discipline are thriving because they understand that clear requirements determine quality output, regardless of the implementer.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#54

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

mhfu wrote: post #52
scorpioxy wrote: post #10

I have been taking on "rescue" projects for a while through my business. Previously, the barely-functioning code was usually being generated via outsourcing agencies but it seems the new source is now going to be LLMs. I imagine it will be the same set of issues really. Just a different way of cost cutting measures. There can be good reasons to take shortcuts but, in my experience, the problems start when you're not…

I was thinking of doing something like that, but how does it work for the company in the end? If they vibe coded their project and now have shitty code full of bugs, you come in, fix the bugs and organize the code better and that's it? How do they continue to maintain it if they didn't have the knowledge to set it up in the first place?

This. Based on what I have seen so far in my company so very anecdotal.

Assuming they know and/or have the capability to do it, between the cost of correcting the issue and push to use AI into everything meaning raising any issue now, politically speaking, is a direct criticism of someone major VP pet projects. I personally simply started to log stuff.

The first thing they need to do first is acknowledge there is a problem to begin with. I am so glad I am not an actual programmer though. It would drive me nuts.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#55

Post by sltr »

pmxi wrote: post #38
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.

This may be interesting to you "Vibe code is legacy code (val.town)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44739556

Thanks pmxi. I read that post when it trended, and it got me thinking. I then wrote a post that tries to give a framework for deciding whether to take a gig fixing vibe code.

https://www.slater.dev/about-that-gig-fixing-vibe-code-slop/

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#56

Post by distalx »

baq wrote: post #48
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…

I bought into that idea a month or two ago, that more control and detailed instructions would deliver a clean result. That just led me down a rabbit hole of endless prompt re-runs and optimization loops. Many time I thought I had the final, perfect prompt, the next iteration slightly worsened the output. And sometimes the output was the same.

The last 20-30% of precision is brutal. The time and tokens we burn trying to perfect a prompt is simply not an optimal use of engineering hours. The problem is simple: Companies prioritize profit over the optimal solution, and the initial sales pitch was about replacement then it changed now its all about speed. I'm not making a case against AI or LLMs; I'm saying the current workflow, a path of least resistance means we are inevitably progressing toward more technical debt and cleanup at our hands.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#59

Post by dist-epoch »

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…

Twitter started as a in Ruby on Rails webapp and everytime Justin Bieber tweeted the whole Twitter would go down and the fail-whale would appear.

But they grew, and one day could afford hiring professionals to rewrite it from scratch on a more scalable and robust stack.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#60

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

flir wrote: post #40
norskeld wrote: post #19

Janitor Engineers [0] are already a thing? Damn. Also, all links in this article starting from the "Why AI code fails at scale" section are dead for some reason, even though it was written only 5 days ago. That raises some questions... EDIT: Not trying to offend anyone with this [0], I've actually had the same half-joking retirement plan since the dawn of vibe coding, to become an "all-organic-code" consultant who un…

I think specialising in brownfield has always been a thing. If anything, it's greenfield that's the rarity.

Thinking of retired COBOL programmers that still have a market...
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