[jwpapi]

I generally like refactoring too, like cleaning up at home, but if you open up a codebase that has been vibecoded and it seems like it’s a never-ending chain of bad practices leading to performance, security, maintenance problems.

I’ve recently been given the task to work on a fully vibe-coded app. I reduced the code from 140k to 28k lines. This was luckily pre-mvp stage so no users. But if people get stuck at this stage, imagine what’s happening with real workload.

I’ve always been a solo dev, but I’m wondering how in big companies there is even so much to you can actually touch that you need an LLM to do that. Like I can’t delete refactor 120k lines in an established codebase. And one task to fix, takes review time and product time. Like are there now engineers that commit 1k+ lines a day of LLM produced output ?

Bugfixing often is just a bunch of lines, or a replacement of a service often isolated maye 150-200 lines, but I just might be just not experienced enough on these kind of codebases. I can’t grasp the notion of the LLM-multiplex and I don’t know where it’s going.

I have to say I have seen some good solo-dev projects popping up recently (games) that actually got profitable, but usually they were experienced in their discipline before.