"vibe coding" is 20% initial prompting, and 80% doing exactly this (with more prompting). At some point we'll have to recognize that there are good and bad coders, and good and bad vibe coders.
Vibe coding cleanup as a service
71–80 of 151 posts
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I wonder if COBOL projects these days, being brownfield by nature, are less political and stressful than brownfield web development projects.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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…
I'm skeptical "get to market as fast as possible, damn the consequences" is as relevant today as it was 10 years ago. People have to be careful not to miss their window trying to be perfect, but first and broken isn't a clear winner over second and working anymore.
I agree with you. There is an advantage to being first on market, but the "damn the consequences" part is very much VC-fueled. Start-ups going to market (and failing) as fast as possible is very much in the financial interest of the VC, but generally good neither the startup nor its employees nor the ecosystem.
I've lived through several semi-disastrous VC-pushed early product launches, and have seen some being sufficiently bad to entirely destroy a product, despite it being extremely useful.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#74I wonder if vibe coding is a bit like DIY plumbing. You can do it yourself a bit and then later when water starts gushing all over your bathroom you hire an emergency plumber at a high fee. You learn a little more for next time.
That probably depends on whether vibe coders do learn from the experience. I guess we'll see.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#75As a freelance developer, I've already had one job that was essentially vibe coding cleanup - though I ended up recommending that I just rewrite the whole codebase (I reused one tiny piece). It's definitely a new world.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#76In the long term, software development is about theory building more than coding. And these are theories that need wrestle with wholly imperfect external systems, as well as business departments whose desires and needs are in conflict with each other and with themselves from day to day.
LLMs are still too sycophantic. The ideal agent needs to say no increasingly as time moves on, explaining why new requirements would conflict with existing commitments, and grunt awkwardly and emit enough noxious fumes so that business people only come forward with their most pressing needs rather than wavering whims.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#77Just 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.
The question is, did you use llm during this process or not?
Fixing vibe coding with yet another vibe coding should be the norm I guess.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#78Where reality seems to be heading:
Company hires a bunch of young MBAs from prestigious universities who don't know how to code; pay them large salaries to produce a massive pile of junk which doesn't work. Pay some engineer with 10+ years of experience to be a 'code janitor' to clean up the mess to actually make it work.
Quite dystopian considering that the experienced engineer could probably build the whole thing in 1/10th of the time from scratch.
This would align with the trend of companies imposing an increasing number of arbitrary and counter-productive constraints on engineers whilst simultaneously expecting them to be more productive.
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#79I 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 suppose a lot of the same kinds of skills will be required for both outsourcing, and LLM driven development.
That is, the "engineering" side of things (requirements gathering, communication, stakeholder management, defining specifications, testing, documentation, and generally managing chaos)
Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service
#80I 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 p…
Have you instructed the agent to produce „simple“ solutions when possible?