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by pzo 172 days ago
I had few projects like that this year and I can say it how messy and demotivating its to cleaning up mess.

And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt.

I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at least rewrite whole module (of course still with AI with just better vibe engineering rather than vibe coding).

It's similar with house renovation - often its just cheaper and faster to tear whole building down rather than fixing it.
1 comments
karmakurtisaani 172 days ago
Would you be able to share any more details on the clean up projects you had to do? Like, wasn't front or back end, which tech stack, where were the LLM code issues etc.

I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.

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pzo 169 days ago
the project was iOS app and vibe coded in Claude Code - it was around half year ago so maybe things improved. Client actually knew some coding so actually quite impressive how far they did manage to go along.

However it was just adding pile of feature after features without taking time to refactor it. Client most likely did some few different attempts to add some specific feature or fixing something and there was a lot of dead code that haven't been used. This dead code actually confused AI and often tried to modify part of code that have been abandoned.

There was completely no tests. No performance tests. And some part of my job was to improve performance (cv/ai model inference) and robustness (crashes, memory leaks).

I think AI is fine and useful but whats bad with such vibe coded project if somebody hand over to you is you have completely no clue what part of the code are written/designed properly with good foundation if previous developer didn't test extensively and didn't refactor continuously. Even worse if you cannot talk to previous developer responsible for the project.

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jakeydus 172 days ago
Not OP, but I’ve spent months cleaning up sqlalchemy models that were written in isolation using AI. Project was just not scalable.
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