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Vibe coding cleanup as a service

donado.co

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Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#91

Post by Tuna-Fish »

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?

The pattern I've seen repeatedly in real life is that a company does something they don't expect to be important and impactful, cutting every corner they possibly can to shovel out something that minimally meets the requirements. And then that software surprises everyone by actually being wildly successful, and now they have to support it and modify it to a state where they can build upon it. Which might be hard if the product is an unholy mess made by people who knew little of what they were doing and cared about it exactly as much as they got paid for it (that is, not much).

And cutting every corner to get the cheapest possible product out might not have even been the wrong call! Presumably most things made this way fare just as well as they were expected to and die quickly after being made, not spending scarce resources on making them better was probably the right thing to do.

It just sucks when you end up having to maintain strict backwards compatibility to something that was made in two weeks by one guy who took every shortcut on the way to duct-tape together something that technically does what was asked for. (Yes I'm thinking of you, javascript.)

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#92

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

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…

One of the issues with vibe coding vs. outsourcing agencies is the sheer volume of code it can produce in a short amount of time.

I vibe-coded a simple helper script. If I wrote it myself it would have been 1/3rd the lines, not covered most edge cases (some of which were completely irrelevant, some of which actually useful), and it would have taken me way longer than just checking if the vibe-coded code works (this was the "either it works or it doesn't" kind of task, not something where subtle errors could reasonably be introduced).

I skimmed the code and removed the line that deletes temp files to reduce the risk that it accidentally wipes my home dir and ran it. As I was trying to work with the data deeper, I noticed missing temp files, and realized that there were two other temp file deletion lines that I missed.

It's simply too much code for a human to reasonably read, but the speed benefits are real.

(My plan for the future is not reading the code more carefully, it's putting it in a sandbox and letting the AI play.)

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#93

Post by t_mahmood »

stevage wrote: post #75

As 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.

Yes, worked on one too, which I pointed out to the client, is not feasible at all

And, on another, where the client seems to have tried to make it work through an LLM, but did not work.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#94

Post by bluefirebrand »

BinaryIgor wrote: post #26
helloplanets wrote: post #23

Would be interesting to see an in depth breakdown on a project that has went through the vibe code to cleanup pipeline in full. Or even just a 'heavy LLM usage' to 'cleanup needed' process. So, if the commits were tagged as LLM vs human written similar to how it's done for Aider[0]: At which point does the LLM capability start to drop off a cliff, which parts of the code needed the most drastic refactors shortly afte…

Interesting idea for some kind of blog post: * come up with requirements for a non-obvious system * try to vibe-code it * clean it up manually * add detailed description and comparisons of before and after; especially, was it faster or slower than just writing everything manually in the first place?

> was it faster or slower than just writing everything manually in the first place?

My suspicion is that for any experienced dev this is slower every time

It is only faster when the person doing the work probably could not have built the thing themselves in the first place

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#96

Post by greenchair »

throwayay5837 wrote: post #70
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.

And the ship is only turned around for a brief period of time because the next gen mbas will restart the outsourcing cycle. The allure of replacing your most expensive employees at one third the cost regardless of quality impacts is just too tempting to pass up.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#97

Post by jplusequalt »

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…

Let me know when aerospace engineers are letting an AI build their planes for them.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#99

Post by liendolucas »

In Spanish we have the saying: "Lo barato sale caro". So in order to save, you turn to "AI", and then you immediately need to turn to a real developer or a development team. If I were in this business, I would charge hefty amounts too, because I can imagine the type of disaster that will have to deal with.

Re: Vibe coding cleanup as a service

#100

Post by herdcall »

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…

There's a BIG difference, at least with tools like Claude Code: plan mode. I'm now using Claude Code a lot at at work, and the first thing I do is enter plan mode where I can have a "conversation" asking it explain how it would implement. Just a few back/forth later I end up refining its plan to conform to good (or what I think is "good") design, after which it will tell me exactly what it is going to do (with code diffs), which I sign off on (again, potentially after a few iterations). It's only then that it generates the code.

By contrast, on one project many years ago I was reviewing the code generated by an overseas team, and I couldn't make head or tail of it, it was an absolute tangled mess that was impossible to fix.

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