[devld]

My non-technical client has totally vibe coded a SaaS prototype with lots of features, way bigger product than OP and it sort of works. They spent like 200 hours on it. I wonder what would have been the time needed to clean it up and approve it is secure. I declined to work on it, as I was not sure if it's even possible or if it would be better to rewrite the entire thing from scratch with better prompts. I was not that sure about it given the cost and the fact that they had a product that sort of worked and I let them go to find someone to clean it up. My reasoning is that if the client took 200h to develop this without stopping to check the code, it would take me 2 - 3 x to rewrite it with AI, but the right way, while the cleanup may be so painful it would be way better value for money to rewrite it from scratch.

[dehrmann]

> I declined to work on it, as I was not sure if it's even possible or if it would be better to rewrite the entire thing from scratch with better prompts.

This is a bit of an unknown right now. If you get a working prototype, but need to productionize it, make sure it can scale, and get it looked over with a security mineset, how long it might take isn't clear, so finding someone who will do that is hard.

[devld]

It sounds like a really crappy deal to a contractor. In the eyes of the client, you are basically a janitor and Claude is like a superstar that built the whole thing, while the truth is reviewing such code is harder than reviewing and quality approving one's own work. I hope it proves out to be uneconomical and we will be just rewriting the vibe code from scratch.