17 ms·

Vibe coding cleanup as a service

250 points by sjdonado 1y ago

d_tr 1y ago
I just take some kitchen paper and one of these small thin plastic bags to clean up after my own dog's shit. No need to pay for a service.
- sjdonado 1y ago
  True, no need to pay for it if you know how to build that same thing from scratch
- d_tr 1y ago
  Just wanted to apologize for the shallow dismissal and the snark. This is going to generate cash flows so the associated activities are totally legit and not parasitic and a waste of oxygen. My gut reaction was not civilized.
  - gus_massa 1y ago
    Most of the times it's easier to refactor whatever is in production that get someone that can write an accurate especification.
anonzzzies 1y ago
Our company has been doing emergency fixes (system that are down, costing companies significant money and they cannot fix) for decades. We have been seeing a significant uptick in occurrences the past few years.
spoaceman7777 1y ago
Need an MCP server that can do this.
- ilaksh 1y ago
  Wouldn't that be using vibe coding to fix vibe coding? And isn't the expected timeframe hours, days or weeks rather than milliseconds or seconds like people expect with MCP?
liampulles 1y ago
I 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.
- CSSer 1y ago
  You could say that. Professional plumbers often love to use tools built to make the lives of DIY plumbers easier too though. The difference is they know when and when not to do so.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  And on youtube, you can find many expert DIYer plumbers who go to greater lengths than pros.
  - eru 1y ago
    Well, a pro is usually under time constraints. If you do something for a living, you have to work faster than if you are doing it as a hobby for fun.
- Yoric 1y ago
  That probably depends on whether vibe coders do learn from the experience. I guess we'll see.
- Lu2025 1y ago
  It's worse. With plumbing, at least you can see what you are doing. Vibe code? One day, it just breaks and you don't know why.
  - jstummbillig 1y ago
    Unless, of course, there is a better AI at a future point, which is able to easily spot and correct the more underlying problems.
    - 1y ago
_9ptr 1y ago
That raises the question if LLM-generated code is going out of fashion in general. The article seems to assume it will always exist and always need clean-up. But what if it's not worth it and instead you should (mainly) return to the world where humans write code? Simply because salary < LLM-credits + cleanup costs.
- lukan 1y ago
  Using a LLM to generate code, that you then check and use is a bit different from vibe coding, where no one looks at the code anymore. But both is here to stay.
- b33j0r 1y ago
  It might turn out to be unsustainably expensive to vibe code all day. That it was so subsidized might have been the irrational exuberance, which arguably leaves a bait-and-switch hangover. But the general idea of compressing every code example in existence into a predictive autocompleter and generative assistant will never go away. It would be like coding without syntax highlighting, by choice. Sure, people did it when they had to, but not anymore. You could, but why? Do I really feel better about myself for writing a slight variation on depth-first search by hand for the 80th time? Not really?
- eru 1y ago
  Vibe coding with today's AIs is definitely going out of fashion. That's because we will have much better AIs tomorrow anyway.
SSchick 1y ago
I've done a fair amount of vibe coding cleanup, ironically using a fair about of LLMs, a lot of leadership are under the false impression that more code means better product, their ignorance is my gain.
scorpioxy 1y ago
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 mindful that there's a price to pay for taking these shortcuts. Whether it comes from managers, employees or outsourced personnel, it's the same result. I haven't thought about advertising it as a separate type of service(for vibe coded platforms) yet but maybe I should. The Australian software market is small so haven't been hearing much about the results of those experiments.
- nickserv 1y ago
  Probably a good idea to at least add some vibe-coding terms to your website for SEO.
  - scorpioxy 1y ago
    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.
- mhfu 1y ago
  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?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
    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.
sltr 1y ago
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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- eru 1y ago
  You can use vibe coding in strongly type languages? I agree that vibed code can often be treated like other legacy code. However is it true that people are reluctant to change vibe code?
  - aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
    > strongly typed languages? Depends on training data. It's not great at rust but it can chug along in small examples. I do suspect strongly typed languages are more suited to AI if it has the opportunity to learn them properly. The movement recently has been generalization, but i personally think if we want to reach further in AI coding, we need models with language and domain specialization. I imagine a AI agent trained to parse LLVM and feed itself static analysis output, could reach new heights of code understanding for Rust for example. > people are reluctant to change vibe code? I think people are reluctant to change existing code in general. Its one thing for a personal project, but for a collaborative codebase, it's a large investment of energy to parse out a unfamiliar part of the system. "The original developer made sure this works, and it passes all tests, so i shouldn't poke it too much without knowing the system as well".
  - opto 1y ago
    I think most often people have some vibe coded stuff that kind of does what they want but they don't really understand what it all is and how it works, or any confidence it can be made into something useful, so rather than spending time cleaning up AI code they just use it to grasp the idea and write it themselves. Whether any time is saved by going through this process with the AI seems doubtful to me. Sitting down with pen and paper and thinking through things would probably be more useful.
howToTestFE 1y ago
I wonder how many of these vibe coding build apps will grow to massive apps/be really popular (I imagine a lot of them will)... and what kind of security vulns we'll see everywhere because of how it was initally built... i can only imagine that services like described in this article will become a very common part of getting proof of concepts built with AI into production.....
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  The infamous "tea dating app leak" was (supposedly) organic home grown human slop, yet did this much damage.... We may see distrust for new apps and websites rise in few years after more people get burnt by things like this. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-hacked-whisper-networks https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-...
distalx 1y ago
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.
- baq 1y ago
  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 for.
  - distalx 1y ago
    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.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    Let me know when aerospace engineers are letting an AI build their planes for them.
    - bethekidyouwant 1y ago
      https://uwaterloo.ca/news/math-innovation/pioneering-future-aerospace-ai https://uwaterloo.ca/news/math-innovation/pioneering-future-...
ares623 1y ago
Talk about sloppy seconds
nickserv 1y ago
> 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 to though, knowing full well the MVP/prototype will go directly into production. Better to take some time to have a decent architecture early on. Product and management probably see that as a waste of time. On the other hand, vibe coding allows the product team to make exactly what they want without having to explain it to developers. That's the real draw to this, basically a much better figma. Perhaps there is a market for a product oriented vibe coding tool, that doesn't pretend to make code, but gives developers much better specifications while allowing the product and business side better input in the process.
- eru 1y ago
  >> 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 beneficial, even if it costs you more time overall. The same reason people can rationally take on technical debt in general.
  - emseetech 1y ago
    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.
    - Yoric 1y ago
      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.
norskeld 1y ago
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 untangles and cleans up AI-generated mess.
- flir 1y ago
  I think specialising in brownfield has always been a thing. If anything, it's greenfield that's the rarity.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Thinking of retired COBOL programmers that still have a market...
    - scorpioxy 1y ago
      I wonder if COBOL projects these days, being brownfield by nature, are less political and stressful than brownfield web development projects.
    - jlokier 1y ago
      There's still a market, but when I looked into COBOL work out of curiosity (I've never been anywhere near it in real life), the salaries I found were surprisingly low, compared with common modern languages. Perhaps the old adage "it's getting hard to find X employees [at the price we are willing to pay]" applies. That surprised me because I've seen articles and heard podcasts for years where they've said COBOL programmers are well paid due to scarcity, though never quoting amounts.
  - sseagull 1y ago
    I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types. Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do. (I admit I’m generally in the settler category) https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html?m=1 https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
helloplanets 1y ago
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 after? [0]: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html
- BinaryIgor 1y ago
  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?
  - bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > 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
    - BinaryIgor 1y ago
      That's also my intuition, but I would like to test and measure it against a real and non-obvious system use case; some day I will and will write about it :)
BinaryIgor 1y ago
Human legacy code turns into machine-generated legacy code; the nature of work remains, more or less, the same
torhorway 1y ago
I've seen some new vibe coding websites that now come with shipping support by a dev as part of the package like https://sparkedby.ai https://sparkedby.ai
yoz-y 1y ago
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.
- eru 1y ago
  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.
  - alex_suzuki 1y ago
    Nvidia likes this future.
alex-moon 1y ago
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 in Healthcare has the same concern, and for quite precisely the same reason: if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from? My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself - people will not pay for garbage. There is a reason books are still printed by established publishers. Why buy a book when you can just print a book on printer paper yourself? Because reading a book on printer paper sucks. I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". I am so intrigued to see how this plays out across the broader economy.
- dist-epoch 1y ago
  > 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
- constantcrying 1y ago
  >I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". For most of human history calculations were performed by humans. Entire banking systems were 100% dependent on humans, with some helpful tools, performing accurate calculations. The idea of not performing that work with machines is laughable now. Machines have replaced humans, especially when correctness matters. Humans are also remarkably bad at being correct and most jobs have a very low impact. I think your perspective is skewed towards the job you are doing, which is in no way representative of most office work, which is mostly tedious, low impact and low stakes.
- 000ooo000 1y ago
  >My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself Based on..? >I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". Autopilot?
warrenmiller 1y ago
Many of the links from this article don’t exist. Is it AI generated slop?
- sjdonado 1y ago
  please try again, we had an issue with the cache and traffic was being routed to a draft version instead of the final article. My apologies
jamesoganesson 1y ago
[dead]
ben30 1y ago
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.
- throwayay5837 1y ago
  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.
  - greenchair 1y ago
    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.
deleted 1y ago
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xchip 1y ago
Where are the apps created with vibe coding? I haven't seen any so far...
dist-epoch 1y ago
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/ https://donado.co/en/articles/2025-08-02-prototype-to-mvp/
nathan_f77 1y ago
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.
- chandlerroth 1y ago
  Agreed, seeing similar good results with those guardrails. Also seeing good results when you actually spend energy and think through the high-level architecture (and document it). Makes it a lot easier for the LLM to snap into place and pattern match.
neya 1y ago
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.
- rmoriz 1y ago
  Have you instructed the agent to produce „simple“ solutions when possible?
  - neya 1y ago
    Yes, the quality of output varies greatly depending on the model. Mostly they will hallucinate. For example, today I ran into an issue with file uploads. It suggested me `async_consume_uploaded_entries` which doesn't even exist.
    - rmoriz 1y ago
      I've made different experiences with Rovo Dev CLI (Sonnet 4). I think LLMs are designed to over-engineer because the learning data, typical open source projects, are over-engineered as well by design (they should provide universal services not tied to a single use case). I had to learn the hard way, since I steer the prompt to 1. limit external dependencies 2. don't introduce abstractions when not needed 3. focus on the main use path it works quite well. Since I also have tests and CI in place, hallucinations are caught very early. IMHO it's mandatory to be productive with the current state of coding agents.
kgeist 1y ago
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.
- mkagenius 1y ago
  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.
sneak 1y ago
"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.
stevage 1y ago
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.
- t_mahmood 1y ago
  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.
liampulles 1y ago
In 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.
jongjong 1y ago
Where 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.
jongjong 1y ago
Insufficient context is definitely a major hurdle for LLMs when coding, but I think an even bigger hurdle is their inability to synthesize ideas and to resolve logical conflicts. They don't seem to have a 'cohesive worldview'; additional context can easily sway them from one conclusion to the opposite conclusion. A large part of coding is about decision-making and prioritization; it's difficult to perform well at either of these tasks unless your worldview is internally consistent.
Krasnol 1y ago
What I've been witnessing in the recent time is that people who have no coding experience but great ideas, get into coding and due to the cheap and fast way of generating this code, have no issues with sharing it. Other people who have more or a lot of experience with coding, help them and everybody profits in the end. I understand that it becomes a problem with some businesses but others may profit too. It's not all bad.
elicash 1y ago
I feel like there should be a term that's like "MVP," but instead of a "minimum viable," it's a FULL FEATURE SET but just super sloppy and not really usable for production. FSV = full slop version
simianparrot 1y ago
10x the productivity measured by lines of code written, but 1/100th the quality measured by pain in the ass to clean up.
rsynnott 1y ago
While this was inevitable, I must say I’m a little surprised it has become a thing this _quickly_.
deleted 1y ago
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liendolucas 1y ago
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.
HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
It's a bit strange that Karpathy's "vibe coding" ever gained traction as a concept, although perhaps only among those without enough experience to know better. As I understand it, what Karpathy was referring to as "vibe coding" was some sort of flow state "just talk to the AI, never look back" thing. Don't look at the generated code, just feel the AGI vibes ... It sounds absolutely horrific if you care even the tiniest bit about the quality of what you are building! Good for laughs and "AGI is here!" Twitter posts, maybe for home projects and throwaway scripts, but as a way of developing serious software ?!!! I think part of the reason this has taken off (other than the cool sounding name) is because it came from Karpathy. The same idea from anyone less well known would have probably been shot down. I've seen junior developers (and even not so junior), pre-AI, code in this kind of way - copy some code from someplace and just hack it until it works. Got a nasty core dump bug? - just reorder your source code until it goes away. At minimum in a corporate environment this way or working would get you talked to, if not put on a performance plan or worse!
- abxyz 1y ago
  For many non-technical people, their relationships with software engineers were producing horrific results. Vibe coding is an indictment of what we’ve been delivering. That a vibe-coded disaster is in any way desirable reflects poorly on us. The branding by Karpathy is cute but irrelevant to its success. I know people running vibe coded startups. The software quality is garbage. But it does what they want. And that’s all they care about for now. Until a time when software quality impacts their business more than losing control does, they’ll keep vibe coding, rather than hiring a software engineer who bastardises their ideas. A garbage version of the thing you want is better than a perfect version of something you don’t want.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    Using AI doesn't necessitate "vibe coding" - there are smart ways to use AI, where you are managing and structuring the process, as well "vibe coding". I guess the problem is that AI now allows non-programmers to program. It would be a bit like giving everyone a scalpel and they now either consider themselves to be surgeons, or give it a go regardless since now they can. I'm not sure where you are getting software engineers that are "bastardising" your ideas?! You may want to look elsewhere, or pay for someone better !
milancurcic 1y ago
Just vibe clean it when GPT-6 comes out.
icyfox 1y ago
From the jump, even without the emdashes, it was crystal clear that this post was written by Claude. I'm sure the OP put their own ideas into the prompt, provided some sources, etc. But reading some of these phrases provoked a pretty visceral sense that I'm just reading an LLM's output: "The harsh reality" "he perfectly captured" "architectural decisions that make senior engineers weep" "fundamental issue" It makes me wonder whether a whole class of writing is going to be deprecated because the cadence is just too similar to LLM outputs.
- skeeter2020 1y ago
  get ready for vibe-writing cleanup as a service...
  - gerdesj 1y ago
    I'm sharpening my biro even as I type ...
- bdzr 1y ago
  I've made heavy use of emdashes my whole life. It feels like I have to eliminate them now :(
  - JKCalhoun 1y ago
    Fight it — otherwise the terrorists win.
  - junon 1y ago
    Surround them with spaces. LLMs don't do that.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    Don't let people's prejudice dictate your actions. If you like them, use them!
  - handfuloflight 1y ago
    N—never!
skeeter2020 1y ago
this article doesn't add much; it's a thin advertorial for their services. It also just seems like typical maintenance programming, which has existed for about 1 day less than the entire time we've been writing software. I guess even this most unattractive of all programming work is also looking for a little AI sauce to spice up the offerring, and justify increased rates (maintenance work: $100/hr; vibe-coding cleanup: $200/hr)
arduanika 1y ago
This is life now. Same old legacy code slog, different brown M&Ms.
dubeye 1y ago
Hmmm i do my own half assed diy and plumbing and the house hasnt fallen over yet, i replaced a pretty complex website and business management software operations and its a little didgy in places but again it is unlikely to explode
paulhodge 1y ago
I think this prediction of "vibe code cleanup" is massively overblown. It's amazing how much code quality doesn't actually matter to the business. Yes we recognize symptoms and downsides of bad code, and yes it matters specifically to the engineers that have to work on it. But only in extreme cases does bad code actually cause an existential threat to the business. The world already runs on bad code.

250 points by sjdonado 1y ago

d_tr 1y ago

I just take some kitchen paper and one of these small thin plastic bags to clean up after my own dog's shit. No need to pay for a service.

sjdonado 1y ago
True, no need to pay for it if you know how to build that same thing from scratch
d_tr 1y ago
Just wanted to apologize for the shallow dismissal and the snark. This is going to generate cash flows so the associated activities are totally legit and not parasitic and a waste of oxygen. My gut reaction was not civilized.
- gus_massa 1y ago
  Most of the times it's easier to refactor whatever is in production that get someone that can write an accurate especification.

anonzzzies 1y ago

Our company has been doing emergency fixes (system that are down, costing companies significant money and they cannot fix) for decades. We have been seeing a significant uptick in occurrences the past few years.

spoaceman7777 1y ago

Need an MCP server that can do this.

ilaksh 1y ago
Wouldn't that be using vibe coding to fix vibe coding? And isn't the expected timeframe hours, days or weeks rather than milliseconds or seconds like people expect with MCP?

liampulles 1y ago

I 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.

CSSer 1y ago
You could say that. Professional plumbers often love to use tools built to make the lives of DIY plumbers easier too though. The difference is they know when and when not to do so.
faangguyindia 1y ago
And on youtube, you can find many expert DIYer plumbers who go to greater lengths than pros.
- eru 1y ago
  Well, a pro is usually under time constraints. If you do something for a living, you have to work faster than if you are doing it as a hobby for fun.
Yoric 1y ago
That probably depends on whether vibe coders do learn from the experience. I guess we'll see.
Lu2025 1y ago
It's worse. With plumbing, at least you can see what you are doing. Vibe code? One day, it just breaks and you don't know why.
- jstummbillig 1y ago
  Unless, of course, there is a better AI at a future point, which is able to easily spot and correct the more underlying problems.
  - 1y ago

_9ptr 1y ago

That raises the question if LLM-generated code is going out of fashion in general. The article seems to assume it will always exist and always need clean-up. But what if it's not worth it and instead you should (mainly) return to the world where humans write code? Simply because salary < LLM-credits + cleanup costs.

lukan 1y ago
Using a LLM to generate code, that you then check and use is a bit different from vibe coding, where no one looks at the code anymore. But both is here to stay.
b33j0r 1y ago
It might turn out to be unsustainably expensive to vibe code all day. That it was so subsidized might have been the irrational exuberance, which arguably leaves a bait-and-switch hangover. But the general idea of compressing every code example in existence into a predictive autocompleter and generative assistant will never go away. It would be like coding without syntax highlighting, by choice. Sure, people did it when they had to, but not anymore. You could, but why? Do I really feel better about myself for writing a slight variation on depth-first search by hand for the 80th time? Not really?
eru 1y ago
Vibe coding with today's AIs is definitely going out of fashion. That's because we will have much better AIs tomorrow anyway.

SSchick 1y ago

I've done a fair amount of vibe coding cleanup, ironically using a fair about of LLMs, a lot of leadership are under the false impression that more code means better product, their ignorance is my gain.

scorpioxy 1y ago

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 mindful that there's a price to pay for taking these shortcuts. Whether it comes from managers, employees or outsourced personnel, it's the same result. I haven't thought about advertising it as a separate type of service(for vibe coded platforms) yet but maybe I should. The Australian software market is small so haven't been hearing much about the results of those experiments.

nickserv 1y ago
Probably a good idea to at least add some vibe-coding terms to your website for SEO.
- scorpioxy 1y ago
  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.
mhfu 1y ago
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?
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  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.

sltr 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago
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eru 1y ago
You can use vibe coding in strongly type languages? I agree that vibed code can often be treated like other legacy code. However is it true that people are reluctant to change vibe code?
- aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
  > strongly typed languages? Depends on training data. It's not great at rust but it can chug along in small examples. I do suspect strongly typed languages are more suited to AI if it has the opportunity to learn them properly. The movement recently has been generalization, but i personally think if we want to reach further in AI coding, we need models with language and domain specialization. I imagine a AI agent trained to parse LLVM and feed itself static analysis output, could reach new heights of code understanding for Rust for example. > people are reluctant to change vibe code? I think people are reluctant to change existing code in general. Its one thing for a personal project, but for a collaborative codebase, it's a large investment of energy to parse out a unfamiliar part of the system. "The original developer made sure this works, and it passes all tests, so i shouldn't poke it too much without knowing the system as well".
- opto 1y ago
  I think most often people have some vibe coded stuff that kind of does what they want but they don't really understand what it all is and how it works, or any confidence it can be made into something useful, so rather than spending time cleaning up AI code they just use it to grasp the idea and write it themselves. Whether any time is saved by going through this process with the AI seems doubtful to me. Sitting down with pen and paper and thinking through things would probably be more useful.

howToTestFE 1y ago

I wonder how many of these vibe coding build apps will grow to massive apps/be really popular (I imagine a lot of them will)... and what kind of security vulns we'll see everywhere because of how it was initally built... i can only imagine that services like described in this article will become a very common part of getting proof of concepts built with AI into production.....

aDyslecticCrow 1y ago
The infamous "tea dating app leak" was (supposedly) organic home grown human slop, yet did this much damage.... We may see distrust for new apps and websites rise in few years after more people get burnt by things like this. https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-hacked-whisper-networks https://www.npr.org/2025/08/02/nx-s1-5483886/tea-app-breach-...

distalx 1y ago

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.

baq 1y ago
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 for.
- distalx 1y ago
  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.
- jplusequalt 1y ago
  Let me know when aerospace engineers are letting an AI build their planes for them.
  - bethekidyouwant 1y ago
    https://uwaterloo.ca/news/math-innovation/pioneering-future-aerospace-ai https://uwaterloo.ca/news/math-innovation/pioneering-future-...

ares623 1y ago

Talk about sloppy seconds

nickserv 1y ago

> 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 to though, knowing full well the MVP/prototype will go directly into production. Better to take some time to have a decent architecture early on. Product and management probably see that as a waste of time. On the other hand, vibe coding allows the product team to make exactly what they want without having to explain it to developers. That's the real draw to this, basically a much better figma. Perhaps there is a market for a product oriented vibe coding tool, that doesn't pretend to make code, but gives developers much better specifications while allowing the product and business side better input in the process.

eru 1y ago
>> 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 beneficial, even if it costs you more time overall. The same reason people can rationally take on technical debt in general.
- emseetech 1y ago
  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.
  - Yoric 1y ago
    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.

norskeld 1y ago

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 untangles and cleans up AI-generated mess.

flir 1y ago
I think specialising in brownfield has always been a thing. If anything, it's greenfield that's the rarity.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Thinking of retired COBOL programmers that still have a market...
  - scorpioxy 1y ago
    I wonder if COBOL projects these days, being brownfield by nature, are less political and stressful than brownfield web development projects.
  - jlokier 1y ago
    There's still a market, but when I looked into COBOL work out of curiosity (I've never been anywhere near it in real life), the salaries I found were surprisingly low, compared with common modern languages. Perhaps the old adage "it's getting hard to find X employees [at the price we are willing to pay]" applies. That surprised me because I've seen articles and heard podcasts for years where they've said COBOL programmers are well paid due to scarcity, though never quoting amounts.
- sseagull 1y ago
  I’ve always found the pioneer, settler, town planner model to be a great way of thinking about this. Successful, long-term projects or organizations eventually can use all 3 types. Maybe vibe coding replaces some pioneering work, but that still leaves a lot for settlers to do. (I admit I’m generally in the settler category) https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-town-planners-and.html?m=1 https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...

helloplanets 1y ago

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 after? [0]: https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html https://aider.chat/HISTORY.html

BinaryIgor 1y ago
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?
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  > 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
  - BinaryIgor 1y ago
    That's also my intuition, but I would like to test and measure it against a real and non-obvious system use case; some day I will and will write about it :)

BinaryIgor 1y ago

Human legacy code turns into machine-generated legacy code; the nature of work remains, more or less, the same

torhorway 1y ago

I've seen some new vibe coding websites that now come with shipping support by a dev as part of the package like https://sparkedby.ai https://sparkedby.ai

yoz-y 1y ago

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.

eru 1y ago
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.
- alex_suzuki 1y ago
  Nvidia likes this future.

alex-moon 1y ago

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 in Healthcare has the same concern, and for quite precisely the same reason: if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from? My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself - people will not pay for garbage. There is a reason books are still printed by established publishers. Why buy a book when you can just print a book on printer paper yourself? Because reading a book on printer paper sucks. I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". I am so intrigued to see how this plays out across the broader economy.

dist-epoch 1y ago
> 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
constantcrying 1y ago
>I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". For most of human history calculations were performed by humans. Entire banking systems were 100% dependent on humans, with some helpful tools, performing accurate calculations. The idea of not performing that work with machines is laughable now. Machines have replaced humans, especially when correctness matters. Humans are also remarkably bad at being correct and most jobs have a very low impact. I think your perspective is skewed towards the job you are doing, which is in no way representative of most office work, which is mostly tedious, low impact and low stakes.
000ooo000 1y ago
>My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself Based on..? >I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". Autopilot?

warrenmiller 1y ago

Many of the links from this article don’t exist. Is it AI generated slop?

sjdonado 1y ago
please try again, we had an issue with the cache and traffic was being routed to a draft version instead of the final article. My apologies

jamesoganesson 1y ago

[dead]

ben30 1y ago

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.

throwayay5837 1y ago
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.
- greenchair 1y ago
  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.

deleted 1y ago

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xchip 1y ago

Where are the apps created with vibe coding? I haven't seen any so far...

dist-epoch 1y ago

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

nathan_f77 1y ago

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.

chandlerroth 1y ago
Agreed, seeing similar good results with those guardrails. Also seeing good results when you actually spend energy and think through the high-level architecture (and document it). Makes it a lot easier for the LLM to snap into place and pattern match.

neya 1y ago

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.

rmoriz 1y ago
Have you instructed the agent to produce „simple“ solutions when possible?
- neya 1y ago
  Yes, the quality of output varies greatly depending on the model. Mostly they will hallucinate. For example, today I ran into an issue with file uploads. It suggested me `async_consume_uploaded_entries` which doesn't even exist.
  - rmoriz 1y ago
    I've made different experiences with Rovo Dev CLI (Sonnet 4). I think LLMs are designed to over-engineer because the learning data, typical open source projects, are over-engineered as well by design (they should provide universal services not tied to a single use case). I had to learn the hard way, since I steer the prompt to 1. limit external dependencies 2. don't introduce abstractions when not needed 3. focus on the main use path it works quite well. Since I also have tests and CI in place, hallucinations are caught very early. IMHO it's mandatory to be productive with the current state of coding agents.

kgeist 1y ago

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.

mkagenius 1y ago
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.

sneak 1y ago

"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.

stevage 1y ago

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.

t_mahmood 1y ago
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.

liampulles 1y ago

In 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.

jongjong 1y ago

Where 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.

jongjong 1y ago

Insufficient context is definitely a major hurdle for LLMs when coding, but I think an even bigger hurdle is their inability to synthesize ideas and to resolve logical conflicts. They don't seem to have a 'cohesive worldview'; additional context can easily sway them from one conclusion to the opposite conclusion. A large part of coding is about decision-making and prioritization; it's difficult to perform well at either of these tasks unless your worldview is internally consistent.

Krasnol 1y ago

What I've been witnessing in the recent time is that people who have no coding experience but great ideas, get into coding and due to the cheap and fast way of generating this code, have no issues with sharing it. Other people who have more or a lot of experience with coding, help them and everybody profits in the end. I understand that it becomes a problem with some businesses but others may profit too. It's not all bad.

elicash 1y ago

I feel like there should be a term that's like "MVP," but instead of a "minimum viable," it's a FULL FEATURE SET but just super sloppy and not really usable for production. FSV = full slop version

simianparrot 1y ago

10x the productivity measured by lines of code written, but 1/100th the quality measured by pain in the ass to clean up.

rsynnott 1y ago

While this was inevitable, I must say I’m a little surprised it has become a thing this _quickly_.

deleted 1y ago

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liendolucas 1y ago

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.

HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago

It's a bit strange that Karpathy's "vibe coding" ever gained traction as a concept, although perhaps only among those without enough experience to know better. As I understand it, what Karpathy was referring to as "vibe coding" was some sort of flow state "just talk to the AI, never look back" thing. Don't look at the generated code, just feel the AGI vibes ... It sounds absolutely horrific if you care even the tiniest bit about the quality of what you are building! Good for laughs and "AGI is here!" Twitter posts, maybe for home projects and throwaway scripts, but as a way of developing serious software ?!!! I think part of the reason this has taken off (other than the cool sounding name) is because it came from Karpathy. The same idea from anyone less well known would have probably been shot down. I've seen junior developers (and even not so junior), pre-AI, code in this kind of way - copy some code from someplace and just hack it until it works. Got a nasty core dump bug? - just reorder your source code until it goes away. At minimum in a corporate environment this way or working would get you talked to, if not put on a performance plan or worse!

abxyz 1y ago
For many non-technical people, their relationships with software engineers were producing horrific results. Vibe coding is an indictment of what we’ve been delivering. That a vibe-coded disaster is in any way desirable reflects poorly on us. The branding by Karpathy is cute but irrelevant to its success. I know people running vibe coded startups. The software quality is garbage. But it does what they want. And that’s all they care about for now. Until a time when software quality impacts their business more than losing control does, they’ll keep vibe coding, rather than hiring a software engineer who bastardises their ideas. A garbage version of the thing you want is better than a perfect version of something you don’t want.
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  Using AI doesn't necessitate "vibe coding" - there are smart ways to use AI, where you are managing and structuring the process, as well "vibe coding". I guess the problem is that AI now allows non-programmers to program. It would be a bit like giving everyone a scalpel and they now either consider themselves to be surgeons, or give it a go regardless since now they can. I'm not sure where you are getting software engineers that are "bastardising" your ideas?! You may want to look elsewhere, or pay for someone better !

milancurcic 1y ago

Just vibe clean it when GPT-6 comes out.

icyfox 1y ago

From the jump, even without the emdashes, it was crystal clear that this post was written by Claude. I'm sure the OP put their own ideas into the prompt, provided some sources, etc. But reading some of these phrases provoked a pretty visceral sense that I'm just reading an LLM's output: "The harsh reality" "he perfectly captured" "architectural decisions that make senior engineers weep" "fundamental issue" It makes me wonder whether a whole class of writing is going to be deprecated because the cadence is just too similar to LLM outputs.

skeeter2020 1y ago
get ready for vibe-writing cleanup as a service...
- gerdesj 1y ago
  I'm sharpening my biro even as I type ...
bdzr 1y ago
I've made heavy use of emdashes my whole life. It feels like I have to eliminate them now :(
- JKCalhoun 1y ago
  Fight it — otherwise the terrorists win.
- junon 1y ago
  Surround them with spaces. LLMs don't do that.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  Don't let people's prejudice dictate your actions. If you like them, use them!
- handfuloflight 1y ago
  N—never!

skeeter2020 1y ago

this article doesn't add much; it's a thin advertorial for their services. It also just seems like typical maintenance programming, which has existed for about 1 day less than the entire time we've been writing software. I guess even this most unattractive of all programming work is also looking for a little AI sauce to spice up the offerring, and justify increased rates (maintenance work: $100/hr; vibe-coding cleanup: $200/hr)

arduanika 1y ago

This is life now. Same old legacy code slog, different brown M&Ms.

dubeye 1y ago

Hmmm i do my own half assed diy and plumbing and the house hasnt fallen over yet, i replaced a pretty complex website and business management software operations and its a little didgy in places but again it is unlikely to explode

paulhodge 1y ago

I think this prediction of "vibe code cleanup" is massively overblown. It's amazing how much code quality doesn't actually matter to the business. Yes we recognize symptoms and downsides of bad code, and yes it matters specifically to the engineers that have to work on it. But only in extreme cases does bad code actually cause an existential threat to the business. The world already runs on bad code.