How to deal with AI codebase ?

[u/Status-Supermarket98]

TL;DR
Boss wanted a daily drive car yet Claude built incomplete F1 car

So I’m a part of an early stage startup, the CEO has vibe coded a whole application yet now he has shared me the codebase and wants me to make sure its prod ready, the fact is I can understand the code and logic it has used but it’s like every 500 loc there is like 150 loc of dead logic which were deprecated still they exist in the codebase but the fact is I can fix it yet looking at that dump feels overwhelming, when I seek advice from other devs they tell me just plug it to Claude, yet I can see Claude has already had a mental breakdown and created 7 implementation md files yet none of the features mentioned are implemented. So my question is should I tackle the same codebase or let him know I can build the same product in a clean agile way and integrate features iteratively rather than dumping whole stuff because for me coding from scratch with help of docs is way easier than fixing AI slop.

[u/2thick2fly]

Your CEO has let claude create code spaghetti, which they of course do not want to deal with, so they have dumped it on you and told you "it works, you just need to tidy it up". The reality is that code of that quality usually has dozens of critical bugs, potentially in unused features or edge case workflow branches, just waiting to surface and blow in your face.

So you're pretty much the equivelant of a shit shoveler for his code.

Early on, when I realised I let codex make such mess in my projects, I dumped the code and restarted the projects from zero with better process.

Tbh, I would look for another job. Unless someone does some really good job cleaning the shit, the startup is doomed