> we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR

> none of them have read any more than a few lines of code

So what do you / your team do?

So wait are you saying you replaced an online tool with a local vibe coded app?

Is it a web app with vibe ops?

What's running all of the workflows now? Are you vibe provisioning new cloud instances? Or does everything run on local machines now?

Press y to doubt that 1k/m using opus… that cannot be true.

I have always felt that AI will be much like how we all now have a calculator in our pockets (despite our math teachers telling us that would never happen lol). For math yes one could sit and do long division and multiplication and so on but having a calculator as a tool obviously makes things so much faster. But you still need to have the knowledge of how math works like the order of operations for it to be correct in the end.

I picture AI coding being the same. Ya someone with no coding knowledge can probably vibe code a small project and have it work. But more complex projects I picture AI like the calculator speeding up the work but in the end one must still understand programing and be able to ensure that the code is correct for the goal.

> I guess it was only a matter of time before this niche of business developed.

This is a fun webpage, and it feeds a certain bias, but there really isn't a "niche" beyond getting people to upvote it for the lulz. I would be extremely surprised if they find a single paying customer. And to be fair, lots of grifters have done the fake it till you make it act on HN, so someone saying "Oh I'm totally going to give them my corps code" convince no one.

>It certainly works great on small scale .... it fails miserably.

If your large system isn't the interactions of a lot of "small scale" projects, you are doing it wrong.

No seriously, it's bizarre how people keep using this as their defence against AI, and at this point it's basically saying "Sure AI works on good projects, but it doesn't work on our giant spaghetti code monstrosity cludged together in a million terrible ways"

I've had tremendous productivity using AI on some enormous and extremely complex projects, courtesy of modularization, separation of concerns, explicit APIs, and so on.

NGL I'd argue there's a certain appeal to "use AI to prototype a feature as fast as possible and focus your engineer hours on building a comprehensive testing and fuzzing plan" followed by a "remove and review everything that can be cut without breaking the tests" cleanup pass.

Ngl I’m doing this right now for a client. Part of my strategy is to write out e2e tests that get a certain baseline of functionality, and then use that as the check for any change that I make to the codebase to make sure it continues to work.

So workflow for a full web app is make e2e tests for all use cases. Then add a very strict duplication checker, and linter, and then just tell the ai to hit a certain duplication limit like 3%, check the linter, and add unit tests to ~95% or greater of the code.

With the right CI and other checks that are deterministic you can really do a lot with a codebase.

Not exactly. It’s more a kin to giving an electric drill to a tradesman vs a screw driver. The tradesman will use the electric drill effectively.

I don’t think this is anything new, really: Businesses have been running software that we’d call a “big ball of mud” [1] forever.

A common way to market to these firms is to be very easy to find when their software starts to have serious issues.

[1] https://www.laputan.org/mud/

From the submitted link:

> we distil what it does

FYI, "distill".

its no difference than US team fixing slop written by outsource company from India. where do you think LLMs learn slop code from?

>I am sharing this because cleaning up after agents with 1M token context is a real business for engineers. Curious what HN thinks.

Its the same as it ever was. Cleaning up after cloud migrations, cleaning up after crypto integrations, cleaning up after LLM tokenmaxxing. I think people are deluded if they tell you LLMs will replace humans.

That would require someone who knows what they are doing, hence this service

I charge $100k to tell them they never needed the code and delete it all.

with AI, documentation driven development is an understatement, if you take the time not just to document but to also provide lots of examples and potentially even data structures for the implementation (including intermediary data structures if you know them) the output is better than anything you would make in reasonable time.

Same here. Honestly, there's also a bunch of human friction that goes away. I can tell a junior that a change needs to be significantly refactored (or even thrown away entirely) without the psychological damage of discarding days/weeks of work from them.

Previously, I would need to do the trade-off calculation. How urgently does this need to ship, and do we have time to rework this? What are the deal breakers that need to be addressed, versus what things are best practice/ideal for maintainability? How did their last code review go and do they need a small win right now?

There's no more "nit" comments tagged as nits: just things to fix. It's de-personalized in the sense that we can both at least pretend/have plausible deniability and blame the model for being dumb, as opposed to the person making mistakes. I flat out told someone that a PR was not solving the right problem earlier, and neither of us thought it was a big deal. I could give the technical guidance and suggest a path forward to "help Claude understand better".

Yeah, that's how I've been using it.

Problem is that you can't do a FOMO-fueled hype IPO that gets a trillion dollars if your argument is "this is a tool that can improve the quality of work your employees output".

It needs to be a "we are building a doomsday weapon here, give me money" argument. Even if it is false. Especially if it is false.

Probably will do a patio11 and keep raising as they get more confident to do so.

They're all based in Poland, so it's probably fairly generous compared to European market.

Some (lots of) people will trade a lot of money for general life freedom. If it's well-booked, a service like this can come to around 105k/year for each dev.

A salary like this is only a big compromise if you live in a very high cost of life area.

This seems like a easy way to get into consulting. Once you deliver the code back to the owners they are going to do the vibe coding again on the top whatever refactored code you get back. In other words it can become a perpetual cycle.

Left behind nothing!

> Now I'm bald.

You always have to remember to tell the barber "No mistakes", just like you have to tell Claude.

How does either of those practices keep code maintainable?

So true. Where do people think agents learned to write slop?!

If the client has an extensive suite of automated tests assessing if the software is meeting its requirements, it should be possible for them to flush out most regressions within minutes or hours, not weeks.

If the client hasn't invested in setting that up, the resulting situation is the clients' responsibility.

Seems fine to me.

> Then we [perform the act of] cut[ting]: [thereby,] the fourteen date formatters become (i.e. are replaced with) one,

I mean, not really? The urge to throw all the code out and start over is what ever mid-level software engineer has always wanted to do, and it’s almost never the right choice. The old code worked well enough most of the time, it just didn’t have good or safe practices and those can be retrofit.

In fact, doing and directing such things are kinda senior, principal and management jobs, in general.

I wonder if this is part of what's clever about pitching their consultancy as slop cleanup -- nobody's likely to engage them to work on a pile of logic that's been evolving over a decade with weird load bearing corner cases. The "I just vibe coded a massive tangle" situations are more likely to be newer.

At least, one could hypothesize. Perhaps incorrectly. :)

https://www.pangram.com/history/54e401e8-30b0-41f4-96a7-a976...

haha

Yes, I think selling "AI cleanup" branding on "we use AI to make smarter AI changes to your codebase" a little.. disingenuous.

But the true cost of minds, not AI assisted minds, is probably higher. They may have found a pricepoint which scales.

Imagine a future, where people get jobs to .. "write code" (in hand quotes) based on specifications "written" by machines..

It's $3333/week