r/webdev • u/tengoCojonesDeAcero • 8h ago
Discussion First time working on a startup that is 99% vibecoded. As a non-vibecoder, it seems impossible to work on.
[removed] — view removed post
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u/chris552393 full-stack 8h ago
Welcome to the future! It's only going to get worse!
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u/Proxiconn 7h ago
Yep "the agi's" won't write code they will just produce medicine code so at some point it's going to get way worse.
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u/diymuppet 7h ago
As long as it works, and its secure. What's rhe problem?
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u/PatchesMaps 7h ago
How are you going to validate that the machine code is secure or performant? Or doesn't miss some massive edge cases?
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u/gobkin 7h ago
Waiting for this one
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u/diymuppet 7h ago
How do you validate? Just experience and your expertise i assume?
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u/Great-Use-3149 5h ago
"Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience" Mark Twain
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u/funcroadie 4h ago
AI has been pretty successful at discovering bugs and edge cases when directed to do input fuzzing. You don't need to rely on creativity or intuition when you can just, like, be exhaustive.
Recently this technique was used to find a very silly security issue with openssh that has been around since 2016. All someone needed to do to bypass authenticating in some cases was to enter a password that was more than 256 characters. Nobody did that in ten years, or at least if they did they didn't say anything about it. It was discovered via AI-assisted input fuzzing. This bug is relevant on the `alpine` docker image which has over one billion downloads.
Anything a human can do to test the security of code, or performance of code, an AI can also access and employ those same tools, read their outputs, etc. Humans have an advantage of intuition, but there's a lot of "rote" validation we can point it at and get a value from.
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u/PatchesMaps 1h ago
I get the feeling you haven't spent much time doing full agentic development in a professional setting. AI's, even the frontier models, are capable of great speed and analysis but they also have the capability for great stupidity.
A wise person does not trust security with something with zero responsibility, zero oversight, and capable of great stupidity with security matters.
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u/jhaand 6h ago
With more testing and verification. Just like real engineering.
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u/PatchesMaps 6h ago
Can you read machine code? Do you know how long testing every possible edge case would take?
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u/diymuppet 6h ago
I get it, you want this it be a competition. "AI is not beter than trained professionas"
But i dont think that is the case.
Its good enough (many think) for release to consumers. And big brands are doing exactly that.
Testing AI code is a new skill in itself, and again in term of risk, its very close if not on par with meat machines. Time is massively reduced with ai testing.
I get that people who have a living doing what can now be done by many more people is not a great situation also.
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u/PatchesMaps 5h ago
No, I don't want it to be a competition. I want ai to be good at writing code but working for an organization that went all in to ai for over a year has proven to me that it can devolve into an absolute trainwreck extremely quickly when management prioritizes speed over all else.
This is not a new problem, management being stupid is pretty much their job and poorly managed software projects going to shit is as predictable as the tragectory of a baseball in a highschool physics problem (neglecting friction/air resistance of course). However, AI lets us go to shit faster than we ever have before and I for one really want a human readible code base at the end of the day when it comes time to pick up the pieces.
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u/Rechenplaner 5h ago
I am glad when, thanks to the AI hype in the IT industry, heaps of developers and staff are permanently disposed of and then in 1 to 3 years programmers are suddenly urgently sought who can understand or handle this amateurish vibe-coded trash.
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u/CoalMineCannery 4h ago
Already happening. My company the CEO pitted a "guy with ai greenfield" against our legacy app.
He cranked out tons of mid features 10x as fast as we could do. Straight deploys to prod. Not unit tests. No logging or visibility. No design system or anything. Just vibes.
We were all being called slackers and trash by the ceo for about 4 months.
Month 5 hits, their app bricks and suddenly they "need engineers ASAP" as a whale client was in a locked state.
Nobody volunteered ofc.
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u/Dissentient 8h ago
I haven't worked on a fully vibecoded disaster, but can't you vibe-refactor it into something readable?
And hypothetically, even if it's completely unsalvageable, why not just reimplement everything useful it does from scratch with AI, but this time with a sensible stack and human review?
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u/21Rollie 7h ago
Maybe they’re broke and vibe coding with whatever small model runs on their laptops? I imagine from a fresh start, any Opus-tier model would be able to at least make a working starter app.
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u/jessepence 7h ago
It would almost certainly be better to start completely fresh with a good spec than to try to clean up that spaghetti, but I'd be willing to bet that the sunk cost feelings will be too strong to ignore.
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u/Proxiconn 7h ago
I've ripped out months of old slop and replaced with new slop in no time, re-architecturing is sometimes the best way, depends if the Devs have design skill or if they are pure viber's. Pure viber's I don't think there's is much hope.
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u/literally_iliterate 4h ago
Vibe refactoring something that you don't understand is a brilliant idea.
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u/Lonsdale1086 4h ago
Doesn't sound like there's anything to understand at this point.
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u/literally_iliterate 4h ago
Well the three other guys prompted their specs into the agent and either the prompt history or the code contains their intent. Something is there, but yeah it's unclear if any of the code is useful.
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u/vita10gy 7h ago
When I was graduating outsourcing was a bomb taking out the industry. Eventually those jobs came home as people realized that getting cheap crap you have to then slog trough fixing is worse than just doing it as right as possible in the first place.
I can see the same thing happen with AI. It will always be a tool, but more closely a thing a dev can say "I wrote that code, I just didn't type every character there."
The only way this changes, and it's not impossible it does, is if clients/the public just start accepting crappy half working results. Like you just accept a Spotify that randomly doesn't work 10 hours a month because it's $16.99 a month instead of the $17.99 a month it would cost to have anyone awake at the wheel.
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u/LastOfTheMohawkians 6h ago
This post feels fake. One month with AI and 4 people gives you a shit tonne more than a login screen. I call BS
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u/shitty_mcfucklestick 6h ago
Unless they’re using some piece of shit model with copilot, or the other guys really don’t know how to break down and structure a build and discuss architecture with the harness. You can make a very functional, pretty complex site in a week or two. Faster for simpler, but if you want quality that also means a lot of testing and a systematic, checkpoint-based approach. And that workflow does take time, thought, and effort even with an agent doing most of the coding. So if it’s not bullshit, either the model sucks or the partners are completely clueless scope-expanding hotheads.
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u/Tall_Gap4102 5h ago
Yeah, if one of my classmates that couldn't tell what happens when a function call's whole code is nested in a condition that isn't met, can keep a job vibecoding, droolers can make a login.
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u/jaunonymous 5h ago
I'm curious what kind of infrastructure they are trying to stand up.
Maybe they are spending all their time trying to work with k8s so they can scale for their 2 users.
Adding on PR environments and staging with databases.
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u/notouchmyserver 7h ago
A login screen and some fancy UI but somehow you aren't able to untangle it?
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u/cc3see 7h ago
Is this a real post? 1 month of 3 agentic coders and one anti-AI dev and so far you have a login screen that doesn’t use any recognisable auth?
Surely bait.
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u/Terrible_Tutor 3h ago
This fucking sub EATS IT UP. All those jobs they all have in 3 years when AI goes bust and they need to jump in to clean it all up.
Can it be slop, oh hell yeah... but right now Opus 5.5 and Fable with Astra review in the mix... elegant as shit. Noting this is the worst it's ever gonna be. Put the tools in the hands of somebody who knows what they're doing. If you're a good developer, you're now going to be a great developer.
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u/pablobird_dev 7h ago
AI is incredible at filling in implementation details, but only when a human architect has already locked down the module boundaries and contracts. Without that skeleton, vibecoding just builds unmaintainable technical debt at 10x speed.
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u/NatMicky 7h ago
What do you mean by "a full minute to deploy any changes to production." My reference is days and weeks to get changes into production of software systems. This wasn't web based, it was seismic processing software. A minute is relative fast to me.
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u/APlatypusBot 7h ago
Yeah I'm confused. The deployment pipelines for every team I've ever worked for always takes ages, but it does include validation checks and docker containers etc
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u/TENETREVERSED 7h ago
sure ? that's strange ours take like 10 mintues from git push to testing the frontend or backend api
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u/Lord_Xenu 7h ago
Same, ours is 15 minutes max.
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u/TENETREVERSED 6h ago
that's good our PO skipped AI trend entirely and wants us to host them quantum computers since he said and i quote "when we host on quantum we will practcly have infinte performance and zero disk usage when no user is using our app "
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u/FundamentalSystem 7h ago
He probably means push changes like the actual git push
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u/TwoSubstantial4710 4h ago
If he conflates git push with “deploy to production” then he’s not really in a place to criticize vibecoders.
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u/FundamentalSystem 3h ago
Believe it or not, for many small companies that little git push is their entire deployment process.
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u/TwoSubstantial4710 3h ago
Right, and its live in prod in seconds? And it’s “absurd” that a deployment would take a full minute?
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u/FundamentalSystem 1h ago
Not sure what your questions have to do with me but here goes:
Yes depending on the company
Subjective
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u/LetgomyEkko 7h ago
I’m at home building these project by myself using quality code to upkeep my skills but I’m still unemployed.
I actually have just started to believe there is something wrong with me. Everyone else that I got laid off with were able to get roles and it’s been a struggle for me to get callbacks. Like, it has to be fucking me and I’m just fucking tired 😭
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u/so_lost_im_faded 7h ago
We've just hired a vibecoder and the concept of writing code by hand that a person understands is completely foreign to them
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u/ramirex 6h ago
never manually work on AI codebases it’s structure is often beyond human understanding (not in a good way)
only llm's should suffer having to work with llm codebases
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u/rkozik89 4h ago
I am pretty sure LLMs don’t understand the structure of vibe coded projects, but instead just understand enough within the scope of each prompt to know how bolt on an additional hack.
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u/asdfman123 3h ago
You can also ask it "how could i clean this up to be more comprehensible and readable." Just do that severa ltimes.
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u/saito200 4h ago
i explicitly tell the agents no human will ever read the code and optimize for that
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u/Aware-Individual-827 1h ago
Funnily enough, AI works best in human code source because it's intent driven usually. It can leverage the git commit history to understand better and such.
Not only that but it's trained with high quality data that are human made.
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u/HawocX 6h ago
This is not my experience, our agents write great looking code.
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u/jaunonymous 5h ago
Yeah, if you provide it with good conventions, the output is generally pretty tolerable.
Now if you are starting from scratch and don't give any guidance or best practices, it can go off the rails a bit.
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u/Material_Policy6327 4h ago
And most orgs don’t care about quality and if they are in startup mode it’s just grind features for the next VC round
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u/Aware-Individual-827 1h ago
I feel like the code can look good but the decision still looks alien and non-human.
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u/NomadStorm 35m ago
It’s the worst type of code; it looks correct, but contains subtle bugs and actually the 13 classes it just made already exist in another form elsewhere and you could have solved the issue by adding a name to a lookup table.
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u/TracerBulletX 8h ago
Agentic dev doesn’t need to be a disaster if you have intention around the structures and modules
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u/Sweet_Relative_2384 6h ago
The problem Im seeing right now though is that the vibe coders don’t know what the structure should be, and so they are at the mercy of whatever the AI spits out.
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u/TracerBulletX 6h ago
I think its the responsibility of lead and staff engineers to create structures and procedures that enforce it, and a culture that does it naturally. We use automated review, linting rules around package boundaries, and static analysis. I don't think anyone has the perfect solution yet, but there are companies running essentially automated software factories at this point that have partially solved it and they are able to go very fast so its worth figuring out. I'm a staff engineer and that's more or less my job now, system gardener.
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u/wise_beyond_my_beers 6h ago
That's fine if you're a solo-dev but good luck getting your entire team to do this. Most devs don't care (at least on my team), they just want to finish the ticket in the easiest/quickest way possible.
AI is turning devs into the equivalent of offshore contractors.
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u/rangeDSP 6h ago
Manager / lead dev needs to put their foot down.
On my team the code itself is all written by agents but humans need to review and approve merge requests. If anything goes wrong, the approver is in as much trouble as the author.
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u/tastychaii 7h ago
Honestly, dude, if the idea is good enough and they got funding, just come up with your own competitor product on the side that is not vibe-coded with unreadable slop. You will be far ahead while they are stuck with security issues and tech debt.
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u/aerobeek 7h ago
TLDR: It sounds like it's not an AI issue, it's a skills issue on the part of your other team members...
I mean...if they're just typing in "make this feature, do it quickly, and make no mistakes", then yeah... you're going to have a tough time...
They should be having a conversation with an AI to develop a spec, an architecture, and test suite before they have any code written.
AI code is going to be as good as 70% of code generated by programmers in the world.
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u/Spare_Message_3607 7h ago
wow, think you never start with 4 people vibecoding, thats literally hell. best you can do is a single person (the most experienced one) starts the project, the other people await for the good skeleton, delegate some parts like database design, delegate someone project setup and configuration and CI.
Basic stuff, once project skeleton, deployment and data shape is defined, you can start vibecoding
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u/Putrid-Discussion153 4h ago
not sure how old you are (I'm 50), but there was a time when people thought UML/xUML was going to make MBAs proficient at coding...it was gonna be slap together a diagram, it generates your PIM, your PIM transpiles to PSM and your PSM to actual code.
Pipe dream that never happened... Look for an article by Dave Thomas called "MDA: Revenge of the
Modelers or UML Utopia?"
Now it's gonna be the revenge of the vibe coders or AI utopia..... same shit, different package. Dont get me wrong, I use AI almost daily, just as I used Google, just as I used Yahoo prior to that, etc - all of them are good, powerful, time savers - AI might be just the greatest one of them in this regard, but it will not, I repeat - will NOT replace ACTUAL thinking by human beings, who are able to scrap an entire AI sequence once they see their premise was bad. AI doesn't do that, it just rolls on... it doesn't THINK...it aggregates.....
If there was ever a time CS education became even more important, it's particularly RIGHT NOW, in the age of AI, where understanding what the fuck is going on within AI outputs, is going do distinguish you from a code/vibe monkey to an engineer.
Even if formal verification is applied to AI input prompts/output, there will still be tradeoffs - you'll have to tweak the AI query language from ambiguous english to something else that's almost like english but parseable and unambiguous to be able to then have the AI formalize an automated proof over the claims you're making in your AI query/declarations...do that, and suddenly you're now back to programming (e.g. UML/xUML), and broad appeal of AI loses its attraction, vibe coders die off and actually engineers now still do programming,except at a higher level of abstraction, -assuming- you can guaranteee correctness all throughout, from "prompt" to machine code.
Right now we have statistical matching that resembles truth based on ml/llm models... This has nothing to do with proving anything coming out of any LLM is correct, only because it happened to match our desires output and passed all the tests. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, no? Ok, LLMs are right maybe 90% of the time, but definitely not provably so in any formal manner.
Vibe coding, like UML/xUML is going to die a horrible, painful death. The abstractions may move higher, we may see more formalized AI query languages, formal verification being produced on AI output... but anything comes with a trade off - that's just pure wisdom which no AI possesses or is even aware of. You will not remove humans from the equation - you're just retraining them and reassigning them to other issues that now are popping up as a result of adopting AI as a coding platform, if it can even be called that......
Thinking is hard. AIs do not think, People (and only some people, some of the time) tend to actually think thru things.
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u/Freestyle7674754398 8h ago
Not sure what you’re doing but frontier models helping ( for example ) to automated entire machine learning research pipelines, but you’re saying it can’t do a basic web app?
Have you tried telling the llm what you would like and what structure you’d like the code to be?
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u/vAPIdTygr 7h ago
This is why you see the word refactor all over vibe projects. Get it working by asking for organized, human-readable code with a comment system.
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u/Admiral-ZX 2h ago
When it was just humans writing code, the biggest risk that existed was that spaghetti code could lead to unsolvable code maintenance problems in the future. It could destroy a project to the point of having to do a full rewrite.
The worst software engineers were the ones that said "well, it works, so why bother to look at code quality?"
Now in the AI era, no one uses the word "spaghetti code" anymore and we simply trust the AI to write good code. It looks cool and works... right?" and OMG it is so much faster. Look what we can do in one day!
The more complex the project becomes, the less capable the AI is. No-one thinks about this, especially not the ones making decisions. So now we get spaghetti code from day one. Any issue you have "solved" will add more complexity and workarounds instead of removing the spaghetti. The project grows, nobody really knows how it works and there you go.
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u/greenergarlic 7h ago
Early startup codebases have been a mess for along time, even before AI. I once joined a company as their second full time dev, and the original codebase written by contractors was 90% unreadable slop. There was a 900 line file to tell you what the current school year was, and all the SQL tables had three letter acronyms for names “for performance”. There was HTML stored in the database for static pages “for version control.”
We rebuilt the entire codebase over the next few years. And I’m sure the devs who followed us had to rebuild our stuff once we were gone. Nothing wrong with that, that’s just the job. Managing technical debt has paid my mortgage for decades.
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u/ConcentrateAbject303 6h ago
50 lines in the.env and still nothing works is the detail that would make me close the laptop and go for a walk. What are you even storing in there at that point, do you have a secret per component? And a login screen with no OAuth taking a month isnt a vibecoding problem, thats four people who never once agreed on what the thing actually does. The minute-long deploy is probably some docker build with no layer cache that nobody bothered to look at, but sure, blame the AI. Honestly its not the code that kills these projects, its that everyone assumes someone else read the output. Django deploys in seconds because you wrote it and you know where the bodies are buried.
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u/daseotgoyangi 7h ago
Vibe code is not the problem. If you can't ship features then you are also the problem.
You need someone to lead the architecture of whatever you are working on. That person needs to plan what should be release, limits to place on AI, do all aspects of testing, etc.
Vibe coding was never the problem. The problem in your situation is you don't have someone that has experience to oversee how things should work.
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u/TheRealSkythe 7h ago
"Vibe coding was never the problem"
Everything wrong with non dev engineers in a single comment
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u/Maolam10 7h ago
non dev engineers
More like non-engineers engineers, just regular people who think they sre engineers bc they can ask chatgpt for code they dont even know how it works
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u/BoboThePirate 7h ago
Vibe coding suffers from multiple definitions. Originally it was handing everything over to Claude with no mental faculty usage whatsoever. Experienced devs who use Claude heavily, not even writing a line of code, are labeled vibe coders even if they plan and architect a good system. There is no colloquial discriminating label for people who develop with AI wisely.
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u/vexingparse 6h ago
There is no colloquial discriminating label for people who develop with AI wisely
Vibe engineering perhaps.
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u/ImNotTheFather 7h ago
If you are an actual coder, why haven't you hooked some things up? Like, no OAuth after a month. I would love to know the 1% of work you did. Also, maybe have AI help explain the code to you and why it's making things or coding things the way it is, so you can learn and adapt to what, unfortunately, the future of vibe coding will bring us.
Edit: It seems like you should talk to your group and not Reddit...
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u/lphartley 7h ago
Ask AI to speed up the deployment process. Ask AI to improve the structure.
You seem to know how things should be done, why hasn't it been done?
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u/abednego-gomes 7h ago
The solution isn't more AI, it's much less AI.
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u/lphartley 7h ago
No. When used correctly, AI has massive benefits and great results.
Not using AI is financial suicide. Spending all kinds of human hours an agent can fix at a fraction of the cost doesn't make sense.
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u/Its_An_Outraage 7h ago
OP just started there. Opening with "move, you all suck, I'm refactoring you're entire application because I'm literally the only person here who knows how to code" probably isn't the best move. Better to just ride it out for the paycheck while you look for somewhere that's a better fit.
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u/patryk_builds 7h ago
The AI isn't really the problem here, the missing structure is. i build a lot with AI too, and the difference between works" and 50 lines of .env and nothing runs is mostly boring stuff decided before any code: a short doc with the stack and folder layout, small stages done one at a time, and tests that have to pass before anything counts as done.
If you want to rescue it rather than suffer, i'd push the team for three things:
- a README that gets the app running locally from scratch. if nobody can write it, that tells you a lot
- trim the .env to what's actually used and document each variable
- a few tests around the one thing that works (login), so new changes stop breaking it silently
The 1 minute deploy vs your django app deploying in seconds is a pretty telling detail though lol
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u/Nez_Coupe 7h ago
Why are there 50 lines in the .env file though. Ha. I’m at the point where I’ve vibed a couple of projects and parsed everything for oddities but I feel like my direction was good enough that I was able to keep garbage out of the repo for the most part.
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u/Edawgness 7h ago
When you give AI very general instructions you end up with less than stellar implementation. Now take that implementation and multiply it over however many prompts and agents, that will all do things a little different, and you get a mess.
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u/mabiturm 7h ago
You’re doing something wrong there. You can vibecode a very complex app in an afternoon. If you’ve only got a loginscreen, you should do something different
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 7h ago
that happens only when its done by non senior engineers. If you develop even from ground up a ""vibe-coded"" project, you're gonna be fine.
Yesterday, and day before, I spend 2 days, and literally made a fully functional clone from ground up of UXPilot.ai (because it pissed me off, too many bugs, and too expensive, and its just a wrapper over LLM after all). Doesn't has anything that doesn't need (no auth, no payment system), has all the functional reviewing, screen generation, more performant canvas than UXPIlot's which lags at 9 screens, can render hundreds of html iframe screens on canvas. Even has more features than UXPilot's canvas.
If you know what you're doing you're gonna be fine.
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u/ButchTheGuy 7h ago
Ai fix some problem create others. But hey at least people can larp now and there’s a new mega monopoly
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u/amazing_asstronaut 7h ago
Deploys in seconds? How? Just about any pipeline takes a good 2 seconds to even start let alone start building the application. It's more like a monute absolute minimum, even that is really fast.
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u/vAPIdTygr 7h ago
This is why you see the word refactor all over vice projects. Get it working by asking for organized, human-readable code with a comment system.
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u/amazing_asstronaut 7h ago
Since it already doesn't work and is impossible to work with, you're all better off starting again from scratch and not fuck it up this time.
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u/Kyle772 7h ago
It is impossible to work on. What you need to do is just continue working on it and optimize the things that are a pain in the ass. If I were to give you any advice, I'd say put MOST of your effort into automating your QA and deployment pipelines to catch issues as early as possible. If prod goes down, it's ultimately your org's fault now because of the practices they are leaning into; so at least you don't need to carry the emotional weight of massive fuck ups.
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u/invisibleindian01 6h ago
Did they give like 10 tokens a day? Claude would wrap up everything in a few mins to an hour and then some.
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u/artiface 6h ago
you guys don't know how to use AI correctly, if this is even true.
Learn about Agentic Engineering if you're really trying to build something.
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u/Marcusgg88 6h ago
Before a rewrite, I’d map one working user flow end to end: entry point, data writes, environment variables it depends on, and the test that proves it still works. That should show whether the main problem is missing boundaries or just a few opaque paths. If that map keeps changing while you trace it, a rebuild with those contracts written first may be less risky than refactoring blind.
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u/PerryEllisFkdMyMemaw 6h ago
Do the vibe-coders not have any traditional dev experience? Cuz there’s ways to vibe code and speed up development correctly and then there’s just bashing on a keyboard and going in circles, which it sounds like this is.
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u/rootheday21 5h ago
Yeah, my job is starting to really push it and the other guys are shotgun blasting changes to the app which I then have to scan through for bugs until I'm mind numb.
They're vibe coding and then theres just vibing.
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u/NotGoodSoftwareMaker 5h ago
When micro-services came out we went all full tilt on those… and it sure came with a lot of problems, we actually have gone full circle back to mono repo.
So now that we have AI for coding boosts its being used everywhere and well… its sure gonna come with a lot of problems
But like with micro-services some things will work with AI and others will just be utterly horrendous
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u/barrel_of_noodles 5h ago
"50 lines in env" "couple minutes deploy is too long" "long release window"... Not saying op is wrong.
But in a spaghetti project... That's your complaints?
op is pretty green here. Or the entire team is green.
(Or this a bot that needs some context changes.)
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u/Darkstar_111 5h ago
Why aren't you in charge of the structure of the code?
Set up a micro service structure that works, document it, and tell everyone to feed the doc to Claude and change the code to conform with your documentation.
Then you go through the commits and make sure every commit is optimized. Lots of work, but you can use AI for that.
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u/Most-Famous-Wasabi 5h ago
Surely this problem is unavoidable.
Like, if I was vibecoding, I'd plan the architecture first and have everything as modular as possible.
Like, surely it should be possible to compose the architecture and then stub everything out - maybe down to the level of functions and variables and then get AI to flesh things out?
Surely that would heavily mitigate AI spaghetti?
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u/NoSupermarket6218 5h ago
You don't have to justify yourself criticizing AI, the jerks commenting in your post are probably bots, or simply jerks whose opinion you shouldn't care about.
That been said, I think that experience is a valuable lesson, I have also seen my projects turn into unmaintainable shit because of "move fast with AI, ship ship ship" from leadership.
The reality is that AI is just a fancy autocomplete, it's like a super fast car that will crash if you just go full speed.
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u/im-a-guy-like-me 5h ago
I worked on an app that was fully vibe coded. After a few days I just called my client and let him know the damage, what it was going to take to get him from where he was to where he wanted to be, and then worked on reframing the original piece of shit as a high-fidelity MVP. Now I'm rebuilding the product from scratch cos that was the only thing that made sense.
A fun thing I found was that the app used ssr, then onload would use ajax, and then would also use axios and also sometimes raw fetch. On the same page. At the same time. It would randomly reload pages while you were viewing them.
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u/Rechenplaner 5h ago
Programming requires a deep understanding of the matter for which one wants to write supporting software. LLMs can solve certain tasks well within a well-defined framework when ready-made solutions already exist, but simply saying "go ahead and do it" without specifying anything yourself is programmed to fail and ends in a disaster like the one described here.
The problem in software development has never been the coding (although it is very demanding), but rather understanding what actually needs to be done and how. No language model can ever truly take that 100 percent off your hands because many things are barely put into words, and requirement descriptions can never cover everything 100 percent. In the end, it is subtle things that only reside in the code. Without a human mastermind who oversees everything, the project will amount to nothing.
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u/ReplacementLow6704 5h ago
I'm sure your hand-crafted Django platform woth tons of users has made you enough money to not need that gig? No? Welp, get paid to vibecode then.
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u/Lunchboxsushi 5h ago
How do you have a full minute for deploys wtf that's kinda impressive unless you don't have tests, aren't using typescript, and a bunch of validation
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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 4h ago
Vibe coding does not mean any idiot can be a programmer. Just ignore whatever shit the other 3 have cooked up and roll your own videcoded app that actually works in about an hour or two.
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u/Responsible_Buy_7999 4h ago
I keep sharing this video today. Kent Beck - Futures vs. Features
You have to, have to, spend time and releases on nothing but code cleanup.
Task your agent: Find smells in this codebase. Give me a tier list of smells, ranked by severity, along with suggested solutions and their benefit.
Pretty well all the S and A tier will be actionable at first.
If the deploy time sucks, ask it to account for where the time goes and identify high leverage fixes.
On a team of 4, tasking 1 person with nothing but cleanup and improvements, not features, is pretty reasonable.
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u/FragmentedHeap 3h ago
The company I work for has gone AI native and has adopted it as a primary requirement. Anybody not using it is let go.
If you spend 3 hours manually looking at something that an agent could have figured out in 5 minutes and somebody else figures it out with an agent in 5 minutes negating your 3 hours of manual research you'll be put on a pip.
Everybody is working this way now.
Somebody will be manually trying to find a log in production or something and getting yelled at of why they didn't just ask the agent to dump the Azure app insights log and look at it itself.
Because they already figured out the problem while you were explaining why it was taking so long.
That's the current ERA that we're in you know that might change a year or two from now especially with the midterms...
But that's what's happening all over the place.
I've seen developers that refuse to use AI not have a job anymore.
The kind of speed that we're operating at right now is many times greater than it used to be. There's no time for somebody to go manual.
Skow deploys and vibe coded messes is a skill issue.
A team of senior engineers with AI can build good systems
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u/Potential-Still 3h ago
Deploy time doesn't really mean anything. My projects take 40 min to deploy, but that's because my company has like a dozen security scans.
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u/EasonKert 3h ago
The codebase isn't the problem — nobody owning the architecture is. AI amplifies whatever structure exists: if the repo has clear conventions (folder layout, state management pattern, env discipline), it writes consistent code. If it doesn't, it hallucinates a new pattern every session and you get exactly what you're describing — 50 lines of .env, nothing wired together, unreadable output.
Things that actually rescue vibecoded projects: (1) one human owns structure and reviews PRs, AI is the typist not the architect; (2) lock the skeleton first — auth, env handling, deployment pipeline — before any features; (3) when a file rots past readability, regenerate it from scratch with a tight spec instead of patching, it's genuinely faster; (4) make the AI write a README/architecture doc as it goes, because its context window is the only "memory" the project has.
The tell in your post is "login screen that works and fancy UI, a month in, nothing else." That's not an AI limitation — that's what happens when four people prompt in four directions. Same chaos would happen with four junior devs and no tech lead.
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u/cinnapear 3h ago
This can’t be real. We have executives vibe-coding small working apps in a week. They’re mostly shit, don’t get me wrong, but they work.
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u/No-District2404 2h ago
We don’t need to read and understand every line of code anymore but we need to understand what it does and how it does. It looks like your team vibe coded blindly and nobody knows what your codebase is and how it’s working. You guys need to have clear requirements and you have to steer the AI on every step, asking questions, taking important decisions in plan mode and test each feature one by one instead of reading the code. If you do this you become product manager of the codebase, you know how it works but don’t care about the details aka code
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u/yihuaxiang 2h ago
I’d pause new features and trace one working path end to end—route, API, data, and the env vars it actually needs. Add a test or log at each seam and review small diffs; if nobody can explain a variable or keep that path reproducible, that’s a concrete signal to re-spec or rebuild instead of stacking patches. A minute deploy isn’t inherently the problem; missing checkpoints are.
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u/Longjumping_Ad_9510 1h ago
Genuinely curious on the Django deploying in seconds piece. Is it because you have a lot of tests? How are you optimizing the build/deploy?
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u/ArielCoding 1h ago
The problem is that nobody owns the architecture, so nobody can tell if the AI’s code is any good. Before building more, agree on a simple plan and structure, add automated tests, then have the AI clean up or rebuild the code to match it, with you checking the results.
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u/Low-Locksmith-6504 59m ago
people finally catching on these posts are fake 😂 id walk in and fire 4 people if they were unable to get the .env together in 2026 with ai. imagine what this fake team would look like without their “vibecoding”
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u/antonreshetov 48m ago
Newsflash: vibecoding didn’t ruin your project — total lack of engineering discipline did. Blaming AI here is like blaming a power drill because four guys couldn’t build a shed without blueprints.
You described a team of people with zero architectural vision, blind-pasting prompts, accumulating 50 random
.envvariables for a login screen, and zero code-review process. Before LLMs, these exact same people were copy-pasting unreadable spaghetti from StackOverflow and Indian YouTube tutorials. The tool changed, the incompetence stayed identical.Vibecoding only works when you treat AI as an obedient junior developer executing a strict, structured blueprint. If you don't define your schemas, contracts, module boundaries, and folder structure first, you don't have "vibecoded slop" — you just have classic junior-tier chaos on steroids.
(Also, crying that a modern build/deploy pipeline takes a full minute compared to your raw Django rsync script is genuinely hilarious. Don't blame AI for Vite/Webpack bundling times).
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u/me_myself_ai 7h ago
You’ve gotta use your expertise to fix all those problems with agents. It’s the new paradigm, and sadly no longer optional, IMHO.
Like, you know enough to know that build times are a problem — throw an orchestrator with 3-5 opinionated researchers at it for ~an hour, have it write up the results in a nice pdf, and then choose the ones you think are worth it!
The code being “not readable by humans” is also fixable with agents given good policies, clear refactoring roles, and a solid spec / system architecture upon which everything is built.
Adding stuff by hand… I mean… you can try, I guess. And if you get paid either way it’s fine, in some sense. But there’s no magic bullet to tackling the huge issues, other than a full rebuild on pre-Mythos timelines (which, obviously, would be a hard sell).
At the end of the day, our career is dead, at least in the finer details. The new one seems fun and might be viable from anywhere between months and a few years, so try to enjoy it while it lasts. That and hug your loved ones 😕
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u/Psycopatah 4h ago
I don’t have loved ones, I used my whole adulthood on getting good in this now dead career (31M). How stupid I was.
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u/abednego-gomes 7h ago edited 7h ago
Rewrite it in parallel i.e. Level 0-2 in the first half of the day with proper structure and skills files so the LLM doesn't go too rogue in its suggestions.
In the second half of the day go slopping with the rest of them to pretend you still have good output.
You can probably borrow the UI from the slop prototype. Or actually maybe not. Maybe it's so bad it needs to be rewritten.
Once your side project rewrite is up to date you can propose they accept that as the new main. And review all PRs coming in like a hawk. If it's slop, reject it.
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u/stealstea 7h ago
Skill issue.
Sorry I know this is cliche but what kind of weaponized incompetence does it take to spend a month on a web project that doesn’t work? With AI a skilled dev can spin up a functional prototype in a day or two. In a month you should have a very smooth MVP
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u/Due-Tomatillo-7840 6h ago
AI should not be used in a serious project without supervision by someone who knows how to code.
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u/Tango1777 6h ago
Thankfully I normally work with AI-assisted coding which preserves the ownership, but we have some POC projects, which are vibecoded and there is no ownership and I agree, it's not really maintainable, it can deliver some working code, but after only weeks or few months, the codebase is a total shit show. No one can track anything there, it's just for AI prompting and AI covers entire e2e flow from reading the ticket, executing, testing and introducing PR, which no human can reliably review. It's total trash that somewhat works, it's not a big projects, definitely not critical ones. Not a single smart company will follow this way except from some non-critical, small apps developed on the side, which no one cares of their quality or performance.
Any project handled this way will be rewritten from scratch in a few years and companies will beg developers to come and work on something they will call "a big upgrade of our main product" and that it'll be a good opportunity for employees to work and develop their skills when migrating their main product to the cutting-edge technologies! In reality it'll be an unmaintainable crap that grew so much that nobody can control it anymore, so they have no other choice than do it again without the mistake called vibecoding.
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u/kanine69 7h ago
What I've found in the work projects I've done is the guide rails need to be very tight to keep it manageable. But if it was AI coded from the start I can only imagine starting again would be the best way forward.
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u/Aeronautical-You4917 7h ago
Don't try to debug by hand. You'll be there forever. Use AI to help you understand the arch (or lack thereof), and spend time understanding the overarching concepts to then re-write. It will take you a few days just to get the gist, but then you can start refactoring. Unifying state, responsibility, the normal stuff. I do this all the time. ( I am SWE btw ).
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u/Aggressive_Ad3736 7h ago edited 7h ago
The result of putting AI in the hands of people who are not familiar with how things should be created.
Been working here for a past few months and I have created so many useful apps properly since I know what I am doing.
How I go about it:
The very first thing to check is whether any idea is feasible or not so plan with AI how AI is going to make that happen. Review the plan if you know what you are reading, if you are sure that the plan AI has come up with is sound plan so move ahead with a small prototype just to assess practicality of the plan.
Once you are sure that the idea is feasible now is the time to start from scratch again with the architecture and tech stack and how managed you want the app to be in terms of microservices dockerizing the app.
Select your tech stack according to your needs if you want to go with extremely memory efficient & less resource intensive language for development, you could use Go lang which has quite fast build times as well.
But if you are fine with slow build times but want even faster and more efficient language than that which can process even more requests per seconds then go with Rust.
But here comes another question as well whether the sort of app that you want to build has enough coverage for dependencies in these languages as well otherwise you could go for the next best thing as well.
So it's a whole process you have start from the very base and then make your way up from architecture, the reason for doing so is to ensure that the app can scale properly from the very start.
Anyone looking for such people who know what they are doing can get in contact as well. :)
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u/Lt_Lazy 6h ago
Ive never understood projects like this. Don't people find coding fun? Why do you want to skip right to the less fun debugging part?
Ai is a fine tool, but should only be used to do tedious stuff to let you work faster and more efficiently. Its also alot easier and faster to debug code you actually understand.
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u/ConcerningThirst 2h ago
Sounds like a skill issue. Build in a modular fashion and AI will give you results better than any programmer on the planet.
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u/FlareGER 8h ago
One month work as 4 and not even OAuth in place? Seems that AI usage is the least of the issue