Do you not fear that future/advanced AI will be able to look at a vibe-coded codebase and make sensible refactors itself?

That's my worry. Might be put off a few years, but still...

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aenis 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

But its already the present.

For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.

In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.

I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.

Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.

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sarchertech an hour ago | parent [-]

> I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.

I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.

If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

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aenis 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

> If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.

Yup, my conclusion exactly.

With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.

	▲	sarchertech 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The thing is good code doesn’t cost more than bad code in the long run. In many cases it doesn’t even cost more in the short run. And it usually has nothing to do with being manicured or elegant. A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems. A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system. Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.

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snarfy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The amount of software needed and the amount being written are off many orders of magnitude. It has been that way since software's inception and I don't see it changing anytime soon. AI tools are like having a jr dev to do your grunt work. Soon it will be like a senior dev. Then like a dev team. I would love to have an entire dev team to do my work. It doesn't change the fact that I still have plenty of work for them to do. I'm not worried AI will take my job I will just be doing bigger jobs.

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abalashov 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Do you not fear that future/advanced AI will be able to look at a vibe-coded codebase and make sensible refactors itself?

This is a possibility in very well-trodden areas of tech, where the stack and the application are both banal to the point of being infinitely well-represented in the training.

As far as anything with any kind of moat whatsoever? Here, I'm not too concerned.

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aenis 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I am no longer sure thats the case. I had it chew through a gnarly problem with my own custom webrtc implementation on a esp32 SOC. It did not rely on any existing documentation as this stuff is quite obscure - it relied on me pointing to specs for webrtc, specs for esp32 SDK, and quite some prompting. But it solved the problems I was dreading to solve manually in a matter of a 2hr session. Thats for a hobby project, we are now starting to experiment using this in the enterprise, on obscure and horrible to work with platforms (such as some industry specific salesforce packages). I think claude can work effectively with existing code, specs on things that would never made it to stackoverflow before.

	▲	abalashov 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That might be true for WebRTC...