[mjr00]

> Apps implemented by the designers. Projects "kickstarted" by the project manager. Codebases at the point antropic / google / openai / ... tool became untenable. Most likely labelled as "just needs a little bit more work".

True, but not a new thing! You've never known true development pain until you're told something from another department "needs some help to get productionized", only to find out that it's a 300 tab Excel file with nightmarish cross-tab interdependencies and VBA macros.

Genuinely not sure if vibe coded Python would be an improvement for these type of "prototype" projects. They'll definitely continue to exist, though.

[mandevil]

A friend got hired by a defense contractor to be the first developer on a new project! Greenfield developing! It turned out the project was here are 30,000 lines of Fortran77 written by two scientists who got Ph.Ds in Geology in ~1985, please make this do X, Y, and Z.

He left that job a week later. It never went on his resume or LinkedIn.

[everforward]

The prompts used to generate it might serve as a list of requirements, which would be helpful. If the codebase is an utter mess, rebuilding the app from prompts would be an option.

I have no idea whether these sorts of projects would be a rewrite or just tidying up, though. I haven't seen what happens when people with no coding experience prompt these. The code I've seen devs get LLMs to generate is usually okay enough to maintain. Not ideal, but workable.

[pbronez]

Well… at least the vibe coded python codebase has better tooling. There are probably some cool tools for fixing rats nests of Macro’d Excel, but I’ve never found them.