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We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix

We have yet to hit this phase in the cycle: "Hey we laid off all our engineers 6 months ago and vibe-coded this thing and now it's super buggy and AI can't fix it. Can you (senior engineer consultant) look under the hood and fix it?" Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back.

satvikpendem 8mo ago
I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.
- Tallain 8mo ago
  I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?
  - satvikpendem 8mo ago
    It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
    - robocat 8mo ago
      Works it (edit sp: Would it) help if the coders' prompts were available (checked in)? If code is your documentation I assume it is hard to divine intent?
      - satvikpendem 8mo ago
        Prompts wouldn't really help, no. You'll have a high level description based on what you're being hired for then the code tells the story.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  This could be a superinteresting field in the future, I guess? But how do you land contracts? Nobody will post on LinkedIn like "Hiring consultant to cleanup or AI-mess-codebase"? :-D So, nobody will admit that they are in trouble already,so how do you find out?
moregrist 8mo ago
> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back. Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.
- sefrost 8mo ago
  If that’s how this works out then perhaps Accenture will be okay after all.
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  > Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on. That's not been my experience. Even pre-AI, when I was asked to find a bug in some hacked-together codebase, sticker shock was often the result. "What do you mean, billing for a week? The guy who created this is an actual software engineer and you're billing just as much as he did!" I've got a list of small ex-clients who won't get work from me anymore, unless they are happy with "Here's my weekly rate, 1 week minimum". Hourly rates don't work on a client who considers $200/m to be overpaying for s/ware development services.
oezi 8mo ago
Well in 2 years AI will have so advanced that none of this matters.
- orphea 8mo ago
  Are you sure that AI companies will keep the current progress?
  - ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
    No, they're going to stop now, yeah that makes a lot more sense.

satvikpendem 8mo ago

I clean up vibe code as a senior engineer consultant, it's quite lucrative actually. I specifically offer this service because I know how to do it.

Tallain 8mo ago
I've been thinking of jumping into this sooner rather than later because I see this becoming a Thing eventually. Are you enjoying it?
- satvikpendem 8mo ago
  It's fine, I suppose. It's like a puzzle, and you really need to be comfortable with banging your head against a wall trying to make work what is essentially immediately created legacy code by the LLM.
  - robocat 8mo ago
    Works it (edit sp: Would it) help if the coders' prompts were available (checked in)? If code is your documentation I assume it is hard to divine intent?
    - satvikpendem 8mo ago
      Prompts wouldn't really help, no. You'll have a high level description based on what you're being hired for then the code tells the story.
KellyCriterion 8mo ago
This could be a superinteresting field in the future, I guess? But how do you land contracts? Nobody will post on LinkedIn like "Hiring consultant to cleanup or AI-mess-codebase"? :-D So, nobody will admit that they are in trouble already,so how do you find out?

moregrist 8mo ago

> Senior engineer looks under the hood, sees 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess with emoji comments everywhere, runs out the door and never looks back. Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on.

sefrost 8mo ago
If that’s how this works out then perhaps Accenture will be okay after all.
lelanthran 8mo ago
> Senior engineering _consultant_ looks at those 500k lines of incomprehensible spaghetti mess and sees $$$: months or years of contracts and likely very dysfunctional management that is willing to pay multiple times the cost of full time employees to keep the burn on a non-payroll line and/or keep the “AI first” story rolling on. That's not been my experience. Even pre-AI, when I was asked to find a bug in some hacked-together codebase, sticker shock was often the result. "What do you mean, billing for a week? The guy who created this is an actual software engineer and you're billing just as much as he did!" I've got a list of small ex-clients who won't get work from me anymore, unless they are happy with "Here's my weekly rate, 1 week minimum". Hourly rates don't work on a client who considers $200/m to be overpaying for s/ware development services.

oezi 8mo ago

Well in 2 years AI will have so advanced that none of this matters.

orphea 8mo ago
Are you sure that AI companies will keep the current progress?
- ekjhgkejhgk 8mo ago
  No, they're going to stop now, yeah that makes a lot more sense.