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Vibe coding cleanup as a service

donado.co

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Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#61

Post by dist-epoch »

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…

> people will not pay for garbage

exactly, the usage of LLMs will only grow as they quickly get better than all the garbage code slop humans write

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#62

Post by dist-epoch »

Cool sister article on their site, the other side, using AI to cleanup AI slop:

> How Senior Engineers Clean Up Code and Scale Products with AI

> Partnering with us means investing in quality, not just speed. We leverage AI to accelerate development and testing,

https://donado.co/en/articles/2025-08-02-prototype-to-mvp/

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#63

Post by nathan_f77 »

I'm pretty good at getting LLMs to write well-tested, production-ready code. I think it's a matter of knowing the right tools and techniques to use and steering the project in the right direction. Type-checking, linting, and a solid test suite go a very long way. It would be a nightmare to work on any project without these.

It could be interesting to take on a consulting project. I haven't done any contract work for many years but I'm curious to see if I could provide some value. Let me know if you need help with making a project more maintainable: refactoring, linters, writing tests, setting up CI/CD pipelines, etc.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#65

Post by scorpioxy »

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?

They would try to hire and/or build the team they need to move forward, if they have the money.

Knowledge is usually not the problem, it is the shortcuts(or short-term decisions) that got them to a place where they can no longer operate the platform they need to survive. Often this is the cause of prioritizing velocity over anything and everything else. This is choosing the do it fast and do it cheap options with the assumption that it is always correct. That assumption of course is almost never true.

By the way, most cases where I've seen this there's usually an investor involved and they need to impress them.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#66

Post by neya »

I use Elixir in production. So, it's already a pretty unique language with very low marketshare in the first place and not many developers are attracted to it because of that and the opportunities. And rarely, I do take on some existing codebases that would smell of code rot from vibe coding. Elixir is one of those languages where it's actually hard to make something look complex. But, vibe coders somehow manage to pull it off. There are usually all these modules all over the place - running Genservers instead of just using something simplified, lot of Javascript like patterns all over the place.

And so, I dug deeper, I tried Claude, GPT-5 and Gemini. While each have their own merit, they all seem to be flawed when it comes to keeping things simple. Having said that, there are a lot of times I'm stuck in these codebases and the AI knows exactly what's happening if you give it the right context (within VS Code). So, definitely you can just setup a small shop to "De-vibe" coding with AI. Ironically.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#67

Post by scorpioxy »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #54
mhfu wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

There's definitely a lot of politics involved in such projects. So I've learned that a break is necessary between major engagements to decrease the risk of burnout.

The environment that creates "rescue" projects is usually not one where long term thinking is prevalent. It would be a pet project of someone who's still there or someone who left but where the ultimate decision maker is still there. Either case, you need to walk on egg-shells and be mindful that dealing with the technology problems is the easiest part of such an engagement. I'm not ashamed to admit that I've learned that lesson the hard way.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#68

Post by scorpioxy »

nickserv wrote: post #20
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…

Probably a good idea to at least add some vibe-coding terms to your website for SEO.

Might be a good idea, though word of mouth and networking is how I get work and SEO has stopped being a useful avenue for a project pipeline quite a while back.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#69

Post by kgeist »

Just a few days ago, I had to "clean up" a vibe-coded prototype:

1) generate API tests using AI

2) refactor the app manually

3) make sure the tests passed

Took me a few hours or so. The app was pretty small, though.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#70

Post by throwayay5837 »

ben30 wrote: post #53

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 o…

Makes me wonder if leadership will bounce back from vibe coding faster than it did from outsourcing?

I wasn't around then but colleagues told me it took years for leadership to understand what's happening and to turn the ship around.

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