I have been taking on "rescue" projects for a while through my business. Previously, the barely-functioning code was usually being generated via outsourcing agencies but it seems the new source is now going to be LLMs.

I imagine it will be the same set of issues really. Just a different way of cost cutting measures. There can be good reasons to take shortcuts but, in my experience, the problems start when you're not mindful that there's a price to pay for taking these shortcuts. Whether it comes from managers, employees or outsourced personnel, it's the same result.

I haven't thought about advertising it as a separate type of service(for vibe coded platforms) yet but maybe I should. The Australian software market is small so haven't been hearing much about the results of those experiments.

One of the issues with vibe coding vs. outsourcing agencies is the sheer volume of code it can produce in a short amount of time.

I vibe-coded a simple helper script. If I wrote it myself it would have been 1/3rd the lines, not covered most edge cases (some of which were completely irrelevant, some of which actually useful), and it would have taken me way longer than just checking if the vibe-coded code works (this was the "either it works or it doesn't" kind of task, not something where subtle errors could reasonably be introduced).

I skimmed the code and removed the line that deletes temp files to reduce the risk that it accidentally wipes my home dir and ran it. As I was trying to work with the data deeper, I noticed missing temp files, and realized that there were two other temp file deletion lines that I missed.

It's simply too much code for a human to reasonably read, but the speed benefits are real.

(My plan for the future is not reading the code more carefully, it's putting it in a sandbox and letting the AI play.)

There's a BIG difference, at least with tools like Claude Code: plan mode. I'm now using Claude Code a lot at at work, and the first thing I do is enter plan mode where I can have a "conversation" asking it explain how it would implement. Just a few back/forth later I end up refining its plan to conform to good (or what I think is "good") design, after which it will tell me exactly what it is going to do (with code diffs), which I sign off on (again, potentially after a few iterations). It's only then that it generates the code.

By contrast, on one project many years ago I was reviewing the code generated by an overseas team, and I couldn't make head or tail of it, it was an absolute tangled mess that was impossible to fix.

Probably a good idea to at least add some vibe-coding terms to your website for SEO.

I was thinking of doing something like that, but how does it work for the company in the end? If they vibe coded their project and now have shitty code full of bugs, you come in, fix the bugs and organize the code better and that's it? How do they continue to maintain it if they didn't have the knowledge to set it up in the first place?

I suppose a lot of the same kinds of skills will be required for both outsourcing, and LLM driven development.

That is, the "engineering" side of things (requirements gathering, communication, stakeholder management, defining specifications, testing, documentation, and generally managing chaos)