I happily got rid of a legacy application (lost the pitch, another agency now must deal with the shit) I inherited as a somewhat technically savvy person about a year ago.

It was built by real people. Not a single line of AI slop in it. It was the most fragile crap I had ever the misfortune to witness. Even in my wildest vibe coding a prototype moments I was not able to get the AI to produce that amount of anti patterns, bad shit and code that would have had Hitchcock running.

I think we would be shocked to see what kind of human slop out there is running in production. The scale might change, but at least in this example, if I had rebuilt the app purely by vibe coding the code quality and the security of the code would actually have improved. Even with the lowest vibe coding effort thinkable.

I am not in any way condoning (is this the right word) bad practices, or shipping vibe code into prod without very, very thorough review. Far from it. I am just trying to provide a counter point to the narrative, that at least in the medium sized business I got to know in my time consulting/working in agencies, I have seen quite a metric ton of slop, that would make coding agents shiver.

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neom 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DigitalOcean version 1 was a duck taped together mash of bash, chron jobs and perl, 2 people out of 12 understood it, 1 knew how to operate it. It worked, but it was insane, like really, really insane. 0% chance the original chatgpt would have written something as bad as DO v1.

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an0malous 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you suggesting the original ChatGPT could build DigitalOcean?

	▲	neom 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To me, built and written are not the same. Built: OK, maybe that's an exaggeration. But could an early "this is pretty good at code" llm have written digitalocean v1? I think it could, yes (no offense Jeff). In terms of volume of code and size of architecture, yeah it was big and complex, but it was literally a bunch of relatively simple cron, bash and perl, and the whole thing was very...sloppy (because we were moving very quickly) - DigitalOcean as I last knew of it (a very long time ago), transformed to a very well written modern go shop. (Source: I am part of the "founding team" or whatever.)

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vb-8448 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI doesn't overcome the limits of the one who is giving the input, like in pre-ai era SW, if the input sucks the output sucks.

What changed is the speed: AI and vibe coding just gave a turboboost to all you described. The amount of code will go parabolic (maybe it's already parabolic) and, in the mid-term, we will need even more swe/sre/devops/security/ecc to keep up.

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geon 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The argument isn’t that all slop is AI, but that all AI is slop.

	▲	baq 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Turns out building enterprise software has more in common with generating slop than not.
	▲	14 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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