This is one of the things I keep thinking about. At the very least, these tools make prototyping and idea vetting remarkably cheaper.

Then we go back to the old “the prototype works; I’m the boss and I’m telling you to deploy it to production”

This is a very interesting thought. We complain about having to fix some MBAs vibecpded slop, but it actually might be faster, easier, and alot less painful than getting them to try to explain their vision to us and implement what they have in mind.

Like they actually iterate on the UX alot when they are vibecoding things up, answer alot of questions that can onky be answered when you see an initial version of experience and realize something is off. Id rather they waste the clankers time with that than mine

What is "IR"?

Hopefully, as the alternative would be leaving money on the table.

yep. exactly that

We have be in business for 30+ years; clients find us.

Most devs will say less, but the reality is most of the time you build the wrong thing first, and the price you quote almost never gets what the client wants/expects and includes many overruns.

Every single contractor will say: that never happens when I do it...

This is a better solution for many businesses.

One, they already have a steaming pile of crap that kind of works. Forking that over to someone to "fix" for €10-50k is a steal - even if there's a decent chance they deliver nothing valuable.

You're talking about on the low end a few weeks of a dev's salary. You get next to nothing for that most of the time...

You could easily spend 4-5x that, take 3-4x longer and get something you can't use at all.

Happens all the time.

As some already said; the real win is into having a business driven prototype; the work to gather those specs is already done and, generally, very costly when done in the traditional way. So from scratch if having to do all of it is more expensive; technical from scratch far less so.

That is also fixing… The client does not care about technical things so indeed rewrite is usually the best way even if we do not tell we did (people are proud of what they made so they do not want to just get told it was thrown away).

Some of this is also going to die out, if the prediction of price increases for LLM tools and tokens holds true. In that case a lot of this software essentially becomes abandonware overnight because the actual maintainer was Claude or Codex.

If you're a reasonably talented developers, I think there will be money to be made picking up projects left behind by coding agents. Maybe you'll use AI tools to do this, maybe you charge to migrate to other platforms and maybe you are paid to simply do bugfixes.

I'm sometimes puzzled by the way people use "circular" to describe an economic system pejoratively. (Not to suggest you are.) Seems like any worthwhile economic system is ultimately cyclical. Pulling resources into the loop is just a bonus....

Well, this is not the first project that has this. Depending what llm/harness and how it is yielded, this happens, a lot. How often have you had Opus 4.x note; ‘485 failed tests, but those are not related to my changes so I will not dive into them’? You believe someone who does not know about tests or code or linting or compilers will push back on that? I know that’s not happening for a fact.

>If you want your project linted/formatted a certain way make it clear to the LLM.

Most people have no clue what that means. Most Devs should know but I would wager that newer devs don't have enough opinion or exposure to do that.

I have approx 40GB of docker containers spun up at any time in order to run the app I work on, and it only seems to get hungrier by the day. I have absolutely 0 problems imagining a single unoptimized Next app needing multiple gigs just to run, yet alone compile.

Linting is also trivial for LLMs. I’d argue linting is one of the easiest and best use cases for coding assistants.

This story doesn’t add up.

Oh sweet summer child...

Do you have any idea, even before modern LLMs, how much code out there was just given more memory instead of optimized? There are even good reasons for it (it can be cheaper than having devs spend time if there's more productive work to be had).

It can be very easy if said code needs to parse through gobs of data.

> No project "needs 10GB" to compile

You've never tried to compile NextJS slop, have you? It absolutely can take that much. All those junkdevs have 64GB in their MBPs for a reason. NodeJS max heap is now dynamic because of this.

The OP said that this was coded by a product person though. The product people coding and using these tools, who are spreading the pro-LLM propaganda, are not doing proper prompt engineering nor lint fixing.

> _no_ LLM will _ever_ generate that

Did you even read the post? Seems you are being overly hostile, defensive and dismissive. Honestly, you sound like an astroturfer to me. I'm curious to check your history to see if you match the vibe.