r/vibecoding • u/DreamPlayPianos • 3d ago
Discussion Most legacy codebases are disasterclasses. The "software engineer you can't fire because only he knows what's going on" is a meme for a reason, and it's not a good one.
I keep seeing people say things like "vibe coders don't understand what's going on in their code." Neither did most programmers even before the pre-AI era. They spent weeks on sprints for small feature updates hoping and praying nothing broke and relied on the 1 guy who wrote some code in 1995 who showed up at the office once every 3 months in his slippers to do bug fixes.
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u/GregerGunnarPersson 3d ago
Sure, and AI is trained on that data. Which is why big enough AI generated systems are also spaghetti code
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u/GoogleIsYourFrenemy 2d ago
Not quite. They weren't rewarded for writing good code, they were rewarded for writing working code.
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u/ZootiLaTucci 3d ago
This sub makes me laugh so hard.
Actual programmers are fucking legends man.
I had the sr full stack title and after 15 years I still have imposter syndrome. Rightly so around legacy dudes.
I haven’t messed with DBs or backends too much since the LLM wave came through but if you want to make an enterprise level application…. You CANNOT vibe code it. There are so many considerations on how something scales that if you’ve never been there it’s all unknown unknowns. Not even going to dive into anything technical.
Dunning Kruger is strong here.
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u/YungBird145 3d ago
Exactly. Vibe coders don’t understand what it’s like trying to work on a code base with 10M+ LOC
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u/Adventurous-Crow-750 3d ago
Principal DevOps, it really isn't that hard guys. Very few are building to something that's never been done. 99/100 things have a literal AWS blog post on "how to do exactly this". Literally just read the documentation and google and you'll be fine.
Any compiled language is going to be fine. If you're app is stateless your gonna be fine else you'll need a sticky lb.
Shove everything in IaC for portability and the day is done.
Most "enterprise" software limps along in super bespoke 10-20 year old envs. They don't even continuously deploy. Most companies should be ashamed they kept their IT in the state it's in. Some still hand deploy and hand build their envs, gross.
Incase you haven't gotten it yet. Enterprise IT isn't tough because it's hard. It's tough because the third approval for a routine change doesn't know why ports can't be used on a layer 2 app. Then when you link documentation, they won't read it.
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u/scbiowastate 2d ago
He said enterprise level. I assume that means high volume of users and acceptable responsiveness. Guides are just general advice, and scaling your business logic is never going to be an easy thing. There’s going to be back and forth tuning and pruning of feature capability that’s lasts for weeks. If a guide says they do 10,000 inserts per second on an aurora large instance, don’t assume you’ll be able to do the same with your queries.
Then there’s multi region, distributed databases, multi data center ACTIVE/ACTIVE Kafka clusters with circuit breakers.. these are not that out of the norm if you work at decent sized companies but doing all this is NOT easy
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u/ZootiLaTucci 2d ago
This isn’t true at all CI/CD is part of compliance, any Fortune 500 company will adhere to the standards or risk having a very very very unpleasant time.
Also this is awful advice it’s like telling someone because they’ve changed their oil on a Honda civic they could be a diesel mechanic for a truck fleet. Apples and oranges and no concept of the scale risk involved.
If you don’t know why you have the architecture you do, you’re fucking up… also you’ll probably get hit with a six figure bill and ask why while rocking back and forth in fetal position under your desk.
This isn’t stuff to be taken lightly, the world kind of operates on it.
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u/sweatierorc 3d ago
I mean the biggest token spender are hyperscalers. Facebook spent 10Billion on Anthropic and Microsft 600Million.
Jensen Huang said that his employee should spend 250k/month on AI.
Google even went from vibe coding is for forbidden to allowing a third party Anthropic.
The inventor of the word vibe coding is Andrej Karpathy.
Linus Torvalds just pushed Claude's fixes to the Linux Kernel.
You will find countless examples of very impressive projects shipped through mostly vibe coding. You just need to look around.
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u/ghostmastergeneral 3d ago
My best friend is at Google and while adoption is high, they have the same struggles with the slop factor as everyone else, and review is still very much the bottleneck.
And I don’t know why you’d bother quoting Huang. The opinion of the CEO of the only company in the world currently making a profit on this stuff is irrelevant. Also $250k/employee/mo. just makes no sense to begin with.
I say all this as someone who codes with AI every day at work, vibe codes at home, and is generally having a good experience with it as a tool.
It’s amazing stuff but the extent to which you can leave things up to agents really depends on your tolerance for fuckery. And in their current state they’re almost more dangerous than they were a year ago because they can basically always get a solution that “works”. Real passing test, generally reasonable semantics. But that can actually hide subtle toxic assumptions that can cause insidious data integrity issues that you don’t find out about until some time has passed.
Still gotta be careful out there.
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u/sweatierorc 3d ago
Where OP is not wrong though is that you are not as dependent of a key dev as you used to be. A lot of SMEs have to keep their devs around longer than they should. Because those guys never wrote any docs.
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u/ZootiLaTucci 3d ago
It’s two different worlds. There is a reason they are fine paying market rate on tokens and not $200/mo subs. Their employees are very talented and can come up with prompts most people in here would take weeks to understand.
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u/Accomplished-Ad-7435 3d ago
This is the biggest divide, when you know how to explain the systems you need built, they are built correctly.
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u/No_Point_1254 3d ago
Yeah, in my view that is the core of it. If you already know what you want and how, then AI is just an accelerator.
If you don't, it is a pure slop generator.
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u/gargelinho 3d ago
yes but those are all world class devs using ai to code, so they know exactly what they are doing and are able to review code
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u/mtutty 3d ago
This is a bunch of cherry picking nonsense.
Facebook is spending BILLIONS of $$ trying to stay relevant, and failing over and over again.
NVidia is directly compensated based on driving token usage worldwide. Of course Jensen is going to say something like "tokens good, drink your Ovaltine". That doesn't mean they're producing anything worthwhile with them.
- Linus has started accepting and even using AI- generated contributions, it's true. Patches are still peer reviewed by humans, and one of those reviews just caught a potentially disastrous race condition. That's a laughably far cry from the "vibe coding" this sub fetishizes.
Pay attention to motivations and actual results. Or don't, there's gonna be good money in cleaning up vibe slop for the foreseeable future.
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u/sweatierorc 3d ago
Or don't, there's gonna be good money in cleaning up vibe slop for the foreseeable future.
I dont see that. OP's main point was that you can now replace the dev in slippers. Good devs can now write extensive documentation and comment their code. Getting rid of a talented individual is not the massive hit it used to be.
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u/mtutty 3d ago
My entire response was to the parent comment. OP's main point only holds up if a lot of things go right, which historically is the exception and not the rule.
The people who built maintainable, documented software before will do so more easily than before. The rest of the crowd will keep forklifting their entire code base every five years because AI is a force multiplier, not a cure for human failings.
The result of that second thing is that there will be good money in cleaning up vibe slop for the foreseeable future.
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u/EcstaticImport 2d ago
Maybe we don’t have the same understanding of what constitutes an enterprise level appplication.
But 95% of enterprise applications are some variations of CRUD.2
u/ZootiLaTucci 2d ago
I’m not sure if you’ve worked in Fortune 500 before, but AS/400s are still in use. There are countless technological constraints on how your systems can run especially in heavily regulated industries.
When I first learned react when it came out a decade ago, I was young and ambitious. I thought we should make everything use modern tooling. Unfortunately it just doesn’t work that way. You can’t have everyone update every system overnight. Think about large scale transactions for instance, do you think they have claude agents doing working in prod environments where billions of dollars a day are getting moved around? What happens when weird edge cases come up that an LLM doesn’t have a dataset to work off of?
Again these unknowns only come with experience. I’m still an idiot and will be til I die, but overconfidence is dangerous when dealing with things that people depend on.
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u/EcstaticImport 2d ago
I think we might be barking at the same tree,
My point was that large corporations are very boring and like things done the same way, using the same architecture.
Most big organisations I work with already have LLMs in place and many have fine tuned models or harnesses in place that are aware of their standards and and documentation repositories.
Getting models to work in the constraints and standards of the organisation is a cake walk as a result.The more history and documentation there is the more info the models have e to go off - models love examples.
And big orgs LOVE documentation.
It’s a match made in heaven!!
I find big organisations much easier to use LLMs with not less.
Yes you have to navigate getting approval if they are new to gen AI but most big orgs I work with are all over genAI like a rash - so it’s been pretty easy.3
u/ZootiLaTucci 2d ago
Again, this is not the reason.
There are regulations in place. It’s not because it’s boring, it’s because redundancy is needed to prevent catastrophic failure.
LLMs are for sure used, but it’s way more strategic than “build me an app”. A lot of it is strictly just mass data analysis when the shape isn’t clear.
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u/2thick2fly 2d ago
I hate when people are pointing a couple documents to their LLMs to read and work accordingly and call it "training" or "fine-tuning" the LLM.
It's embarrassing for people who actually know how to train or fine tune models (I'm not of them)
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u/EcstaticImport 2d ago
I’ve not seen that anyone claim “fine tuning” when they are just providing context - but I can imagine it is an easy mistake to make.
I was quite surprised the org actually went to the trouble of fine-tuning a model for their coding standards.
But it seemed to be legit.I would say someone wanted to do fine-tuning and as they were in the “AI Team” why not get work to pay for it!?
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u/ZootiLaTucci 2d ago
Software is only a small part of it, that’s the point. Anyone can make a piece of software, very few can scale, even less can ensure it’s going to stay standing when people are hammering it between basic use and trying to do unsavory things.
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u/SufficientlyEvasive 3d ago
Coping on this one.
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u/ZootiLaTucci 3d ago
I haven’t written a line of code in like 18 months. I’m all for this new ecosystem. Just want to emphasize that experience is still worth a lot and the only reason LLMs work is because those old grumpy devs posted some dope ass stuff on Stack Overflow years ago.
It’s all exciting though and I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade. Use the tools and learn as you build, it’s the way it’s always been done!1
u/Thin-Grass8694 3d ago
I have a very basic experience of creating software.
I've developed an app using AI - never looked at a line of code - and thousands of payments run through it every month.
What are a few of the things you think I'm missing and not understanding?
(This is a genuine question, not an argument lol)
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u/ZootiLaTucci 3d ago
Where liabilities fall. If you’re taking thousands of payments a month you should have someone do an audit to be on the safe side. Also if you become more popular than you currently are you should have plans to scale without breaking the bank. Probably the two biggest things tbh, security and scaling without killing a bank account.
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u/plebbening 3d ago
Imo there is a very big difference between vibe coding and AI assisted coding.
If you have no clue about architecture, software design, security, existing tooling etc. you will at some point end up with software you have no clue how to fix or scale. At this point there is quite a big likelihood that a full rewrite is needed to keep maintaining the app as the choices the llm made with the vibecoder only solved the current problem in isolation without having any idea of the bigger picture.
Vibecoding will get you very far very fast and it’s amazing. Seasoned developers just now that creating a greenfield project is always fun and easy, the hard part is maintaining, tweaking and scaling that project for years without breaking everything.
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u/justwalk1234 3d ago
I'm extremely tempted to let the AI to take a look at their repo and just tidy their mess up.
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u/GOOD_NEWS_EVERYBODY_ 3d ago
literally as easy as that. claude can refactor shite pre-ai code in stages and unit test each so that it does break way way way faster than any human can right now. in fact we have to be careful to tell it not to overoptimize or it will sometimes be unreadable stuff that runs like 100x better when we only need it to run 10x better.
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u/zenbeni 3d ago
You summer child. If it runs for many years like that, everything has adapted around, like when people used bugs in sdk to do what they wanted and maintainers can't change it without breaking their biggest clients.
Software does not care about beauty, production is the real test, static analysis of code will always miss the main factors about run. It can't for now.
You refactor this, chances are the app dies and you get CTO in your office, if not you are not working on something big enough and you focus on things that are not worthy to refactor.
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u/Wonderful_Entry_6121 3d ago
You refactor this, chances are the app dies and you get CTO in your office,
And the CTO is saying the company is not making money, so you need to fix it faster. He will not say lets make this maintainable and documented properly so in the future, no matter who is working the code, we have an easier time migrating away from this god-awful practices.
And then in a few years, the app dies again for another fad, or paradigm, or corp takeover by bullshit consultants, etc. Figure out how you want to survive and make your bag of money. The CTO will forget your name 2 seconds after leaving the conf call, and still believe he is a GREAT CTO.
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u/Relevant-Positive-48 3d ago edited 3d ago
I have decades of experience. There have always been people who understand just enough to get their work done and people who make it their business to understand, in-depth, how the product they're working on functions.
The latter made better developers pre generative AI coding and they make better developers in the generative AI coding era too.
The former can (sometimes) make better managers/entrepreneurs if the latter constantly gets lost in the weeds but that doesn't happen as often as the guy "who showed up at the office once every 3 months in his slippers to do bug fixes." stereotype would seem to indicate.
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u/atlas_principle_dev 3d ago
I only had this experience in one place during my dev career, where's this coming from?
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u/PeachScary413 3d ago
From youtube and Instagram reels.. most people here base their opinions of SWE on what they see online since they haven't worked in the business.
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u/Hawkes75 3d ago
What a vast overgeneralization based on nothing but hyperbole and stereotype. You've clearly never worked on a legacy systems team, where institutional knowledge is paramount and companies will pay a premium to retain existing staff over new hires. I'm currently experiencing a contractual change at work where a likely new prime has already negotiated with existing staffing agencies to avoid losing our in-place team.
You know nothing.
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u/TryAgainTryHarder 2d ago edited 1d ago
developers were willfully ignorant of areas of the codebase they either didn't need to change, or explicitly avoided for the risks. that doesn't mean they couldn't understand anything that happened there.
vibe coders don't know if the code is good or bad because they are not capable of netting out the differences between what they prompted, what was built, what they intended, and what their users expect/need.
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u/Carbon_Cotton 2d ago
"This codebase is mess that only few engineers understand. The solution is to change it so that 0 engineers will understand it."
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u/PeachScary413 3d ago
This is hillarious to read, it's like a child guessing what it is to work extrapolate their experience of kindergarten and imagining corporate life to be similar 😂
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u/Anti-Hero25 3d ago
The anger towards Ai from Devs comes with the same distain artist and musicians have for it.
I think some Devs truly believe software development is in some way an “art” … requiring a selective creative expertise .
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u/Tarwine 3d ago
Well imo code can be art. But not all code is art.
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u/Anti-Hero25 3d ago
I agree… but my analogy for all this is…
I can buy a hammer , drill & wood, but can’t build a house.
Now I have a team of knowledgeable contractors who can build a house to accepted standards…. And my job is to direct and steer them in the right ways. The more I know about building the better my end product will be. Hence why I think experienced devs should lean on this . No poo poo it
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u/Tarwine 3d ago
I think it’s just going to mean devs will have new titles, they will be producers instead.
I think it also means that code “quality” doesn’t matter anymore and it will be treated as disposable and re-created whenever needed.
Solo devs and small shops may still do hand coding as an artisan craft but it won’t be seen as the “efficient” way to make software.
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u/ZootiLaTucci 3d ago
They are called Technical Product Managers/Designers
Code quality still matters. All your stuff still comes from maintained libraries. Vulnerabilities are a thing and always will be.
Solo devs and small shops cannot afford to code by hand. People can write for a hobby, but why… it’s like writing a letter instead of sending a text message.
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u/ghostmastergeneral 3d ago
From a mechanical perspective can recreate code as much as you want really easily, but you can’t recreate your data. If you fuck up your data you’re in for pain.
This is what people who haven’t done this for a living don’t understand. Your code shapes your data, so if you can’t fuck with your data willy-nilly, you can’t do so with your code either.
The “if it’s bad, just rewrite it” notion is a fallacy: either the ai is good enough to be able to fully trust it to not fuck your data, in which case you don’t need to throw away code because it will be good enough to not require it, or it’s not that good you can’t throw the code away because it will wreck your data.
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u/Ok_Purple_3840 3d ago
That's why you have data lake + publication sets
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u/sarcastosaurus 2d ago
If you have a vibe coded app which then writes bad data to the data lake, you can fix the code all you want after the fact, but you're not fixing the data (think customer purchases in a given timeframe).
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u/ghostmastergeneral 2d ago
That’s literally not. If your OLTP sets are poisoned, so are your OLAP. You have to remediate everything.
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u/Wonderful_Entry_6121 3d ago
Now I have a team of knowledgeable contractors who can build a house to accepted standards…
for an amount of money that makes the job a good choice for their career. I think you are getting close to the point. The end product is better if you understand the goal of the experienced dev and how it may not align with your goal. You may be interested in building one house, but the contractors are interested in building houses as a career/job. In the case of software development, the workers are interested in having code that is maintainable for as long as possible, where the company is usually interested in next quarters metrics and profits.
If the company who wants their app to work and make money doesn't see the devs as contributors whose experience makes a difference, then AI is an easy crutch to say "Replace the dev and put more money into AI to help them." Management has always wanted to find ways to work around Time and Experience. If Money could replace any of those, in any way, then they try it. Even it it means very short term gains. Why? Maybe there are legitimate threats from other competitors. Maybe the Management has no idea what the work truly entails, and DOES NOT WANT TO KNOW.
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u/Inconstant_Moo 2d ago
That would certainly be one explanation of why AIs are bad at it. Do you have a better one?
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u/Anti-Hero25 2d ago
I don’t think Ai is bad at writing code. It’s a language… either it’s correct or not. I acknowledge that the variable linguistic paths you can take to achieve the same result make ALL the difference… which is a knowledge base devs have in the bag… so I think they should exploit that. THEY know how best to assemble the language ….. it’s a full auto nail gun vs … the lowly one - at - time hammer & nail.
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u/Inconstant_Moo 2d ago
I don’t think Ai is bad at writing code. It’s a language… either it’s correct or not.
"It works" is a very low bar.
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u/AcoustixAudio 2d ago
some Devs truly believe software development is in some way an “art”
Exactly. It's so not. That devoted their entire lives learning and working hard to develop and polish code they cared about and Loved working on. What Idiots!
creative expertise
This is a myth. A developer of 20 years vibe coding will actually be worse than a vibe coder who knows nothing. The key is to learn nothing and know nothing.
Vibe coding is the future. This is called the golden age of to-do lists for a reason
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u/Entuaka 3d ago edited 3d ago
Most developers have generated 100% their code with AI in the past months. We don't write code anymore since last year, but we're still hiring.
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u/silentkode26 3d ago
AI should write your comments too, I neary got stroke trying to read that.
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u/Entuaka 3d ago
It was 1am and I write quickly. Code is now 100% AI generated, it's a new tool that we're using to build software much faster. This is not an art, it's just a job.
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u/silentkode26 3d ago
Code is certainly not 100 % AI generated. Also more lines of code doesn’t equal better code. It you look at the actual stats, you would be suprised that it is not translated into productivity.
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u/Entuaka 3d ago
At my job, a big (100k+ employees) non tech company, we don't write code manually since last year. Same for many friends working at other companies.
The productivity is limited by the bottleneck, but now the bottleneck shouldn't be writing code.
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u/silentkode26 3d ago
It’s still far from 100 % being generated by AI. It’s like saying 100 % of cars use diesel.
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u/Entuaka 3d ago
Companies still writing code manually are outdated and will have to adapt soon.
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u/silentkode26 3d ago
You have no idea what are you talking about.
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u/Entuaka 2d ago
If you and your company didn't adapt yet, you'll understand next year.
For a big legacy project, the productivity gain is limited because usually the project is not optimized for AI and the team has other bottlenecks.
For a greenfield project, the productivity is not comparable to working without AI, it's a multiplier.
Dev teams can now automate the dev from ticket to pull requests. We're even automating some lvl3 support tickets. I almost always worked on projects with a lot of tech debt accumulation, but now we can have agents working on issues.
The goal have always been a high productivity, that's a reason why it was always hard to spend enough time on tech debt, writing tests, refactoring, DX, etc. It was not providing value to stakeholders, but now we can quickly do it with AI to keep quality. We had to take time to plan everything because writing code was slow.
The work for dev is now to help agents to validate that their changes are doing what's expected, giving them the tools for that, monitoring, improving AI workflows and agents, define the architecture to follow, add guardrails, etc.
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u/RoboErectus 3d ago
I disagree.
Their distain comes purely from never knowing how things work in the first place.
They thought they had a special place because they memorized some syntax and rules and maybe could do some l33tcode.
I've been annoyed by those kinds of devs for my whole 30 year career. (That's not true. I used to think they were good when I was young.)
It has always been about solving problems. And if someone isn't using the best tools available and pushing those tools to the limit... Forget 'em.
Always been that way. Those guys hated rails and it amounted to the same.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
Lol no, nobody was ever crediting themselves "I know fringe xyz rule of some random language"
The difference was that before, you tackled the problem, and thought out the solution (in code), and you also weighed the options, the pros and cons, and you came up with a strategy. You also took into context emotional feelings, what you FELT would be a good idea, what you FELT would be reasonable to allow some wiggle room for.
Everything was spelled out exactly in the code, almost to the point that you can see exactly what the developer was thinking and even WHY they were thinking of certain things.
But now it's just a vibe coded mess. It doesn't even matter if the vibe code is good, or bad, or clean, or unreadable. What matters is that the resulted output is just an emotionless mess which doesn't necessarily follow any logical flow other than what the AI decided at the time. And let's be real, no one is carefully even using AI anymore, I'm not either, we are one-shot prompting entire features, the "better" devs will at least analyze the git diffs, but the average and below average ones are just letting everything slide and over time, little by little, everything becomes thoughtless enshittification.
And then you're paid to "problem solve" problems that should've already been resolved but because everything is vibed you don't even have an understanding of what's going on so you need to vibe some more, to solve problems that didn't exist before
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u/RoboErectus 2d ago
What in the software engineering fan fiction is this?
I'm not even sure where to begin.
I can see the Manga you're writing and you got something here if that's your angle. "I can...feeeeeeel the writer's intention...."
Every SWE I ever knew including myself says "what piece of shit wrote this piece of shit?" until they git blame it.
... I guess I should point out to you that that's mostly a joke. I cannot imagine someone typing out your comment that has done any significant software development ever. I thought I was a joke until I re-read the start.
Are you larping as a greaybeard that is horrified at llm coding? Because most of us love it.
Code is shit. It's all shit. It's always been shit. ("But not myyyyy code!") Occasionally some of it is beautiful and clever and gives you a grin.
But the vast vast majority of code generated by wiggling meat on switches is just as gross as it sounds.
And then you replace it with a library in a year anyway.
There are people who like film photography. There are people that like to do woodworking by hand. That stuff will always have an art to it.
But hello world is hello world. Ain't no two ways about it.
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u/Icy-Nothing-189 2d ago
Lol, it's not a manga. If you've ever worked on a sizable project that wasn't built by a revolving door of a publically traded workforce/corporation like Amazon or some shit (which is just original AI slop but using raw human labor as the AI slop), and if you look through the code you will see how things were organized, written, and laid out and why they were laid out that way given the business requirements of what needed to happen
But that's not like niche hand woodworking, that's just software development. The code is used to solve a problem, and following the code you can see what problem was being solved.
With AI, those lines are completely blurred, because the AI isn't crafting a bigger picture, it's attempting to solve the prompt using probability from its training sets. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but either way the understanding and flow was completely lost along the way
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u/RoboErectus 2d ago
You could have just written "I don't know how it works," and it would have saved your meat a lot of wiggling.
Any human that decides where to put new loc's will look at whatever alphabet soup is the design pattern and move accordingly. I think humans are presently a 'Lil better but not that much better at making this decision.
If they (the human or the LLM) get it wrong, code review (human or llm) should catch that.
If the boundaries need to be strictly enforced then you put it across a repo or an api.
Literally nothing has changed except now I have a pair programming partner who is literally always super down to take a fun little side quest if we wanna clean something up.
Like...idk if you're trying to "no true Scotsman" FAANG of all flookin flarkin things right now... "Wellll a reeeeeeeaaall software company would have a problem with this" (seriously?) but whatever you're doing is either moving goalposts or just failing to understand how harnesses and an agentic sdlc works.
I feel like I'm talking to someone who learned everything about SWE on tv. No offense we are probably in very very different environments. I'm in the one that's shipping product value 😝
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u/Appropriate-Dig4180 1d ago
But you need to.solve it in a way you can add to it later, be Co fident it can work with the change , and iat still easy to reason about.
Ai can be great, but it has no intuition about the future. It can solve a problem at hand very well, so bug fixes can be a dream. When rearchitecting a system, not so much. It requires a lot of guidance.
Software development isn't an art like painting or making music, but there is a craft and it does take skill being leet code and syntax.
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u/RoboErectus 1d ago
My man, you could have just written, “I don’t really know how this works,” and it would have saved you from all that typing.
Like… “when re-architecting a system…” have you ever done that?
It’s so much easier and faster to do it right now: event driven, well made admin tooling, observability at all the right layers…
When you see patterns across the codebase it’s so much easier to refactor into extractable helpers or classes.
I think you guys seem to think there is nothing between “I one shot my todo app” and “we only use edlin and c”
We’re still building systems. We’re not writing locs.
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u/Appropriate-Dig4180 1d ago
I have a lot, for operational critical systems in place. I knows it not simple. I would be willing to bet I have done it more than you, and do it better.
I don't write lines of code, but it takes a tremendous amount of supervision to still make it right. It can make functional code to spec, but what about 5 major changes later ? What about a few years down the road. It needs to be understandable to those running the tools. Data structures need to make sense and e flexible for foreseeable use cases.
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u/RoboErectus 1d ago
I'm not even sure where to go with you guys. Ever watch those YouTube videos where a doctor is talking to a room full of anti-vaxxers?
It seems like all you anti-ai guys have are platitudes. it doesn't seem like you want to learn.
Like... The only way I can make sense of your comment is if you didn't actually understand mine at all.
"I don't write lines of code..."
That part I believe.
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u/vexmach1ne 3d ago
I spent years learning game development and now I'm almost never typing code myself. I don't regret those years. I embraced the new technology.
If you're able to make a good product even for someone who never wrote a line of code in their life, good luck.
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u/WifeyCallsMeLazy 3d ago
Yeah, one more "Open your mouth and I'll put some kindly concentrated uric acid in it" kind off post.
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u/Snoo_57113 3d ago
I have a different view of "legacy". Everything you do is legacy the second you release it, be it the libraries, the model, the vibeslop we generate daily probably will be rewritten next year/month.
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u/BarfingOnMyFace 3d ago
This is such a dumb take. You paint in black and white,.not realizing software is developed in a large spectrum of gray. It's sad you paint us all with the same brush stroke. People comparing vibecoding to art and artists. Well I say it's true, but the vibecoder who understands his trade and understands his tools, is a good artist, generally, while the latter is not.
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u/Pure-Investment-1227 3d ago
Good thing is that ai can now easily understand and rewrite or explain legacy codebases
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u/DesignerAbigail800 3d ago
legacy code is just archaeological digs with extra steps and more coffee
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u/Pierma 3d ago
yes, vibe coders do not understand what's going on. I had to clean up a mess done even with opus 5.5 of a python fastapi app that claimed to be reaching the target 300 req/s on production environment (it's a heavy request) and:
- it claimed to do 300 req/s, but it never waited the responses. With responses, it reached 12 req/s
- it was leaking memory and the container inside the kubernetes environment restarted for OOM every 15 minutes
- Environment variables were alle hard coded even if it claimed not to be the case
- Even if the target framework is well known and well documented and optimal for AI development without touching the code by hand, having the user have 0 idea on how to write proper software had so many blatant mistakes that even a junior dev could have fixed them looking at the documentation for 10 seconds that tanked the performance in a ridiculous manner
Useless to say the guy got laid off
It is true that legacy codebases are distaster classes, and more often than not the software engineer you can't fire because only he knows what's going on is the guy who actually caused the disaster and using AI is a good start to profile the applicaton based of the actual spec to start modernize that shit, but "vibe coders don't understand what's going on in their code" is still true and even with absurd models like opus 5.5 and sol 6.1 they still are incapable of understanding the hell they are doing
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u/Et3rn41 3d ago edited 3d ago
Lol, broski decided to create a whole shitpost, must have touched that little nerve:
https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1x6vqos/comment/ph1p813/
Well, pretty much the same response:
Lol, nice try Anthropic. I’m sure the galaxy of slop nobody has ever read and understood will work out just fine.
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u/zazzersmel 3d ago
The important thing here is lowering standards in the workplace for man and machine alike. Fuck those nerds, solidarity!
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u/gfddssoh 3d ago
We have a dev that likes to make 4-5k lines files with multiple classes inside. Because he likes to use ctrl + f to find functions. Kidd you not
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u/djslakor 3d ago
The typescript compiler was also mostly one big file.
Maybe you can have a word with Anders about why he's wrong.
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u/Inconstant_Moo 2d ago
Was. It's now been rewritten in Go, it has rather more files than that, and it's ten times faster.
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u/SilentNinja1337 3d ago
I have been writing corporate level code, years before I have used AI to code. And that was mainly because you can't justifiy the same costs anymore (the manual writing part is not economically, doesn't mean code reviews aren't). The AI regularly gets wrong what I have meant by it, on an architectural level. To be fair, I haven't documented much. For me comments where necessary and tests are enough documentation. The employees of the customer's company know what the jargon means.
So I would still say, fire me. Let's see where the software goes.
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u/OriginalScrubLord 3d ago
This is true. All of the massive legacy code bases I've worked on have been absolute nightmares. Trying to enforce standards and code quality is hard enough to do if you are working solo. For every software developer you add to a team, you can expect some degradation of quality and cohesion. Even with rock solid code review and linting you drift a bit. One thing under appreciated in the AI era, is that they can actually follow guidelines much easier than teams of human beings. It's not deterministic, but compared to humans trying to do it, it's close enough to that.
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u/Ok_Technician_5797 3d ago
99% of artists make minimum wage based on the time put into their art.
And they want to complain?
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u/Pescadorcito 3d ago
Hay un malentendido, nadie está contra la IA. Solo estamos insatisfechos con lo que hace la IA.
No piensen que hay un movimiento anti IA.
Es solo ( inconformidad) con su calidad
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u/ClibeanCeann 2d ago
The difference is people who actually learn how to code can go into legacy codebases (which at their time were completely fine and cutting edge technology), and refactor and fix as needed. I have in the past. There is no way a vibecoder could do that by looking into the code and understanding it. They could vibecode a fix maybe. But only as long as the legacy documentation exists and their LLM knows what the fuck it is.
You are right in that having someone with knowledge of the systems used somewhere are most valuable. But that happens in every industry, everywhere. But you still clearly do not understand what you are talking about. Sow what is your point?
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u/Independent-Race-259 2d ago
Not sure where you have been working but everywhere I have worked th devs understood the code. the odd moron scraped their way by but majority knew very well what they were doing.
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u/GoogleIsYourFrenemy 2d ago edited 2d ago
There is no such thing as a perfect codebase, there will always be some idiot who will look at it and not understand it. There will always be time and budget constant limiting codebase improvements. Everything is done with trade-offs. A design that is fine when the codebase is five thousand lines of code likely won't scale to fifty thousand lines of code.
So calling most legacy codebase disasters is both true and very false.
I know developers who don't know what's going on and those that do. The ones that don't are the nepotism hires
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u/PenguinsStoleMyCat 1d ago
A bit of truth in it for sure. I was a product owner and we had a backlog that we could never chip away at. At one point I considered just clearing the entire thing. The team was never going to get to tickets from years ago, let alone tickets that were 6 months old.
We had components in our system that only certain devs knew and we'd be screwed when they left. We had a legacy C++ app that ran the most important part of our backend, and it rarely ever changed, but we had one guy that could work on it if it needed a patch.
So yeah...having AI is a million times better than the shit show it was.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 1d ago
i mean that is exactly the reason why vibe coding is bad --- except that instead of an unmaintainable 20 year-old legacy app, the tech debt piles up way faster... after a few days
Just directing an agent basic software engineering principles leads to waaaay better results and code that's more maintainable
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u/Solid-Common-8046 3d ago
no, programmers understood how to code, they wrote proprietary code and virtually no documentation because that was their job security
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u/ready-eddy 3d ago
With all this reverse engineering going on lately. I wonder how many shitty bugs are going to be fixed OR be discovered that there were the cause of some trainwreck code
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u/SufficientlyEvasive 3d ago
Eh most of it isn't really going to be looked at unless it's causing problems.
Opus 5.5 class is kind of scary good, if AI Development stopped here we'd probably enter a golden era just on fine tuning it.
That fact that the ceiling hasn't been reached and it's only been getting faster is somewhat concerning actually.
In a year plus 5.5 will be obsolete and being ran on a high end gaming computer.
Society really is about to see a bigger revolution than the industrial one, and it's not even one we need to be in the loop anymore.
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u/ready-eddy 3d ago
Yea Opus 5.5 really changed something. I do mainly creative work for the past 20 years. But since opus 5.5 I’ve turboboosted my workflow so fucking much. Together with a graphic designed we’ve been possible to pump out a fully fletched high end brand design within a few dats. That would’ve cost us a month a least before AI.
And video/animations, it’s so crazy good now in the right hands. I really feel like we’re going towards a singularity, but also dead internet. Rip1
u/ghostmastergeneral 3d ago
Yeah the dead internet thing is sad. But it’s what we deserve, I guess.
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u/FreshSatisfaction184 3d ago
The attitude of this sub has visibly changed. Previously, posts were always about how vibe coders were chancing their luck using ai to code. Not any more.
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u/DreamPlayPianos 3d ago
Reddit's always 6-12 months behind everyone else. Every single major tech company has been all in on AI coding since late 2025.
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u/lemacx 3d ago
Absolutely. I don't know where this idolized idea comes from, that pre-AI the code was "perfect" or always good. It is quite the opposite. I've worked with legacy codebases where no one dared to make a change because it was so complex and big. Where project managers always chose the shortcut to get the "quick wins". Where no time was spent reducing technical debt. And now? I'm currently upgrading a spring boot application from SB1 to 4. It consinsts of multiple microservices and without AI this taks would have taken years (in fact one senior developer tried it pre-AI and failed because it was just not feasible). With AI it took several months only. I can generate thousands of tests, something you wouldnt have done before, without the resources and manpower. It's magic. And yes, of course you still have to understand what the agent does.
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u/Cuchullain99 3d ago
In 2/3 years you'll be able to speak into your phone, "make me an app that does xyz" and that app will be functional ready to go instantly. Same for programs.
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u/Zwieke 3d ago
Wym 2/3 years? I already do this. One shot apps from phone incl deployment is already here and you don't even need the most capable models to do it.
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u/Cuchullain99 3d ago
Well obviously proper complex apps with api , you cannot do that yet, and it won't be this year either.. dunno what "one shot apps" you're talking about.. and the other thing is, if Apple don't open their app store they'll be dead.
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u/yoloqueuesf 3d ago
I mean it's a dumb argument simply because you can keep tracking the prerequisites.
Like software engineers complain about vibe coding, but then are the guys who built the OS or the hardware guys complaining about them?
We're in a phase of big change, there are people who are going to be upset because it affects their jobs or it affects decades of hardwork and dedication to their craft having a bunch of new guys come in and just cheatsheet through 90% of it in a month.
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u/resonant_saloon 3d ago
buddy of mine worked at a bank where the entire atm routing sat on a perl script one dude wrote in '98. he'd left the company, but they still paid him 500 bucks a month just to answer one email a month. every time a new release went out they'd light a candle and pray. the comments in the code were just "don't touch this" or "sorry". that's not engineering, that's hostage negotiation. and they still do it cause rewriting would cost more than just keepin the old fella on retainer. i guess that's the real art, keeping a thing alive with duct tape and a prayer.
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u/satoryvape 3d ago
Disasterclass is the stakeholders fault. They always want features that must be made asap
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u/Practical-Web-4443 3d ago
There's real truth here, the "nobody understands the legacy system except one guy in slippers" trope exists because plenty of pre-AI codebases were held together by tribal knowledge and prayer, not clean comprehension.
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u/Kavrae 2d ago
Both are wrong.
Legacy code should be incrementally cleaned up as it's modified.
Legacy devs need to document their knowledge
New devs need to learn the systems.
(The company I work for does all three to varying degrees of success)
Vibe coders need to learn how things work before auto-generating them.
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u/Outrageous_Basis_232 3d ago
They're the fucking reason your precious AI exists. Show a little respect.
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u/VelumLucis 3d ago
Yup. Human-written code is a liability at this point relative to agent-first codebases. When done properly they’re just an entirely new class of software. It’s like comparing a 2006 Toyota Camry to an F35.
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u/PickleFlex 3d ago edited 3d ago
yeah, then the guy quits, and everything needs to be rewritten, but they don't know what links everything together. thats why so many older applications end up a huge in size, bloated and chuggy