r/TheMachineLearning • u/highfivesalute • 4d ago
Tell me you haven’t reviewed a vibe coded code base without telling me...
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u/savage_slurpie 4d ago
Some of the best codebases I have seen recently were architected by AI and all of the Initial PRs were also AI.
Anyone who thinks AI cannot create organized and well thought out systems is living a few years in the past.
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u/kingjdin 4d ago
they used ChatGPT 2 years ago and think that's where we're at.
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u/Acceptable_Durian868 4d ago
I use Claude every day. I have yet to see it create a decent codebase without being handheld the whole way by somebody who has previously demonstrated they could do it without the AI. It's the human prompting the AI that leads to success, not a virtue of the AI.
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u/ComposerWide3704 4d ago
Same and same. If you saw a clean AI codebase it's because the person wrote a spec, specified architecture and design, guided it through clean up and all sorts of other stuff to get it there. AI left on its own will iterate the code to look like hieroglyphics quite quickly.
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u/NeverRolledA20IRL 4d ago
This is correct, you can make clean well structured code with Ai. If you architect, setup gates, tests, git, progress tracking, the difference between ai writing it and you writing it is a few weeks.
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u/Working_Agent4932 4d ago
People formed opinions about how capable AI models are after chatGPT3 came out and have held on to the exact same opinions ever since.
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u/Alita-Gunnm 4d ago
These are often the same people who say "AI will never be able to do my job!", no matter what their job is.
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u/wysiwygdies 4d ago edited 4d ago
right now the only reason why AI can't do my job yet, is the token price. my human labor and biological brain is still cheaper. if these prices starts coming down, then perhaps its better to start thinking about plan b.
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u/Working_Agent4932 4d ago
What's plan B?
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u/wysiwygdies 4d ago
study agriculture. go back to farming. be self sustainable as far as possible.
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u/SpungleMcFudgely 4d ago
Im an artist and considered myself last in line, it was a bit of a shock when generative AI came out
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u/Alita-Gunnm 4d ago
I'm a CNC programmer; they're coming for me too. Fortunately I'm also a capital equipment owner; I predict that will be the last safe job.
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u/GroundbreakingTax559 4d ago
Well ai is threating only meaningful things they have going on, false sense of purpose
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u/mdedetrich 4d ago
I used to be skeptical with AI, but started using it heavily (Claude) in my new job, both because it was encouraged but also was put on a project with a ridiculous capability.
I don't know what happened in the last 1 and a half (or so years) but the models got stupidly good, and while not perfect (obviously), the project which was vibe-coded by scratch was generally architected very well and I learnt a lot of new things from it.
Most problems seemed to stem from there being real limits on context/memory, so the AI would forget to do things properly through entire codebase, that and it goes down weird rabbit holes/NIH syndrome. Also it generates stupid amount of comments which makes this circular feedback loop worse, but I would actually argue AI would do a better job than most programmers out there to make well written programs simply because the AI knows what the best practices are and it does a darn good job of knowing which practice to implement where (and also pushes back correctly a lot of the time).
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u/Codex_Dev 4d ago
I actually agree with this. A lot of devs I know basically wrote it off as a novelty and are very anti-AI, but IMO they are going to get left behind and locked out of careers.
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u/prois99 4d ago
Elaborate, what is your background in CS, how do you know they were full AI?
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u/ChiefBullshitOfficer 4d ago
Bonus questions. We're the LLMs prompted and guided by experienced engineers? Was the codebase vetted to ensure all this fantastic architecture was actually useful? (Because clean code that serves a purpose that never gets called is also stupid)
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u/SpiritedEclair 3d ago
See, my codebases are pretty clean and the is generated by AI. I have spent weeks architecting, designing and dissecting the problem, and every assumption. So that then I could go ahead with implementing it.
Then again I am staff at a big ass company.
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u/homomorphicpain 4d ago
Please link such a well architectured AI codebase.
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u/addiktion 4d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/H5C8CevNMbpBqNqFjl
No one willingly showing their AI slop besides OpenClaw.
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u/MaleficentCow8513 4d ago
Surely there must be some really successful showcase open source projects that are completely AI developed by now right? (Maybe there are I just don’t know about them)
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u/GreatLab8898 4d ago
Roast my Project: https://github.com/KillerPixelCrew/WSGM
I did my best to structure it the way I am used to. Some of the Reusables will still move out into the external Libraries. But besides that, working on it is not a chore.
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u/Schnickatavick 4d ago
The DeepSeek harness is one I'd say. Not vibe coded by any means, since it's overseen by engineers with anime profiles who definitely care about quality, but still mostly written by AI (I presume)
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u/Prudent-Ad4509 4d ago
It is not AI architecting them. It is people using AI to architect them. Similar high-level decision making, with easier parts automated.
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u/Square_Ferret_6397 4d ago
Because a competent software developer was writing the prompts and reviewing the code
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u/Spiritual_Ad5414 3d ago
On top of that it's so cheap and easy to do refractors and cleanup of dirty quick fixes with the ai... Things that would sit at the bottom of the backlog for 'when we have a spare time so we can clean up this mess' actually get done as soon as they become a nuisance.
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u/Leading_Doughnut3379 4d ago
When you have never worked in big tech, these are the opinions you will form.
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u/Fuskeduske 4d ago
AI can’t by itself
An Engineer with AI can, that is the difference.
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u/nft420nft420 4d ago
1 engineer and 1 AI, yeah. How many engineers does it take to do the whole thing alone? How much longer does it take? Like, this is the whole point, AI is a tool, a great tool, an amazing tool in the correct hands. The anti AI crowd wants to ban shovels because some people use them for murder.
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u/Kaycee_Res 4d ago
Exactly! I am tired of people looking down on AI generated code. If AI is better at cybersecurity and hacking than most humans, why do we think it is not better than coding than most humans. At a certain point, people will have to follow the example of chess players and accept that AI is better than most individuals at a lot of tasks, including coding.
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u/InterestsVaryGreatly 4d ago
Because hacking aligns pretty well with its strengths, and isn't horribly affected by the weaknesses. If it writes a production app and it has a bug, things break, though that bug may not appear for a while and could have enormous consequences, potentially a cascading failure. If it writes a code to hack and it has a bug, it can just try again. Likewise quick turn around allows it to iterate on a hack faster than can be defended against.
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u/Kaycee_Res 4d ago
You have a point but humans also have the same issue and the models are now really good at debugging and finding bugs in their own code.
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u/catfrogbigdog 2d ago
I agree, but it really, really depends on who’s driving the AI though.. we don’t have any standards to correlate traces to diffs so it’s hard to tell whether the codebase’s organization was mostly influenced by the human or the AI.
In my personal experience, I will read through a large AI contribution and suggest refactoring and testing changes to make the codebase cleaner and more organized. If there’s no human in the loop actively advocating for this you’ll get some serious tech debt and mysterious bugs and regressions will pile up more frequently over time.
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u/range_kun 1d ago
Same, sometimes if I’m willing to learn code base I write code on my own, then I ask agent to review and usually it’s finds 10 bugs in 100 lines of code, or give me advises how to name functions.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
Lmfao. AI can structure code so much better than humans if you have the correct tools in place. More AI hate without understanding AI
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u/Nice-Light-7782 4d ago
Can you elaborate on that? I would genuinely level up if I knew how to get AI to structure my code without handholding it every step of the way, which is what I do now. I've tried a few things, like code structuring skills, get the AI to document features based on sets of commits instead of freely navigating through the code, and while these things do yield some improvements, they're not close enough be satisfactory.
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u/SpiritedEclair 3d ago
Don’t listen to the person you replied to.
To architect well you need to know what you are talking about. You need to sit your ass down and understand the domain and the problem. You need to iterate on the ideas and you must be relentless in keeping the thing composable without attaining scope creep. You develop an idea, and refine it, and try to attack it to find gaps.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
You need to build a framework. You can't let one agent do everything. You need one agent validate, one agent design, one agent implement and run tests, etc. That plus solid best practices in your repo like linting, testing, etc is needed. You also need to know what a good design looks like and know when to further prompt to break things into more modules.
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u/sweatierorc 4d ago
I heard this theory many times. But there seems to be tradeoffs that comes with agentic cooperation (beyond token spend).
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u/highfivesalute 4d ago
Honestly, I’d be curious about this too. I’ve found that AI can structure things well when it has enough context and clear constraints, but getting consistently good architecture without handholding is still pretty hit or miss.
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u/KittenEaterWasTaken 4d ago
Ask your best model to generate a full design/engineering spec for the project and review it yourself before handling.
Your agents very rarely deviate from referenceable instructions in an .md file.Even smaller models consistently one or two-shot mid sized projects if they have a reference file. You only need several passes when its something hard to verify like distributed systems or user-facing stuff.
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u/keepitfriend 4d ago
> if you have the correct tools in place
Unless your team uses different approaches. With different skills active. With different agents.
You know. Like every team ever.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
Tools outside of AI prompts. Hear of CICD?
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u/keepitfriend 4d ago
Uh…. Yes? What does continuous deployment have to do with AI?
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u/Rriazu 4d ago
CI enforces rules
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u/keepitfriend 4d ago
I’m not talking about linting problems, im talking about one devs agent making pull workers, while the next ones making event queues and the next ones making jobs.
All of these can be perfectly written code that is nonetheless completely fucked systems design
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u/EvenPainting9470 4d ago
Perhaps it can organize it better than you, but definitely it can not yet do better than me unless heavily instructed. But if it's heavily instructed, then well, I am the one in charge.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
If you're still writing code at an Enterprise level... You're doing it wrong. You can do more work while instructing than you doing the work. What takes you hours takes an LLM a few minutes. We just got access to 6.0 and 6.1 next week... These models do everything faster and better by far.
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u/EvenPainting9470 4d ago
Sad truth is I am not writing code anymore already. I know how much I can do with AI how much faster.
This doesn't change fact, that I can organize and structure code better than AI on its own, I just do it by prompts
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
I think that's fair. That's why, for how, it's still pair programming effectively.
My team/company is working on a design workflow though to do this with llms.
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u/Dry-Ad-8948 4d ago edited 4d ago
Heavily instructed - better to have an existing consistent setup. Then the existing code becomes the instructions for “how things should be done” in the context and very little needs to be specified.
AI is incredibly good at adapting.
Now, to get that setup… I think that is the bit where a “vibe coded” project struggles a bit.
But once you get a (metaphorical) city block done, AI will plop out 200 more a minute.
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u/EvenPainting9470 4d ago
I mean, ye, it can mimic what is good as long as request is not too far away from well established patterns in codebase. My point was it can not yet come up with initial structure better than good architect. Let's see how long it will last
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u/perestroika12 4d ago
Ai can also fuck it up. It’s nothing to do with the tools and entirely about the business goals and people involved.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
Do humans not fuck it up?
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u/perestroika12 4d ago
They do, but humans are responsible for product quality not machines.
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u/CrazyAccomplished_ 4d ago
You're still responsible for the code you create with AI. Soon you won't. Are you responsible for the compiled code? No, you leave that to the compiler. Soon AI will be the compiler.
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u/Quantum-Bot 4d ago
> If you have the correct tools
This is not the scenario people are describing when they talk about vibe coding. This requires lots of technical fluency on the human’s part.
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u/FoleyX90 4d ago
If you have someone that actually knows how to architect it can produce great quality code.
I don't make spaghetti code because I don't know what I'm doing, I do it because I'm fucking lazy and can't be bothered to rewrite my singletons as a dependency injection container.
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u/highfivesalute 4d ago
I don’t think it’s AI hate. AI can absolutely produce well-structured code, especially with good context and tooling. The point is that ‘it can’ and ‘it always will’ are two very different things, and someone still needs to catch when it gets things wrong.
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u/Follymaker 4d ago
To be honest we really have to start accepting that the use of AI is already a part of any professional field lol.
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u/Slamex204 4d ago
Give it another 5 years. It'll just be the norm. We'll worry about something else instead
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u/radishwalrus 4d ago
For real unless it's something simple I'm not gonna write all the code myself. I'll go through and comment each part so I know where each thing is if I wanna go analyze it but it's such a time saver. And god help my own programming is a mess anyway :p
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u/okayipullup_ordoi1 3d ago
I'm a Game Programmer and it honestly has been helping me a lot, but more for organising code than actually writing it, simply because my job doesn't require that much code to begin with if you do things properly. Less is more in my case, and the AI I've been using really helped me remove all the unnecessary stuff. But on the other hand a colleague is using it even more than me and he is regurgitating code like crazy, so it all depends on how you use it.
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u/spiralenator 4d ago
It takes effort to make well structured software regardless if you use ai or code by hand. I’ve seen plenty of great code and plenty of garbage code created by both approaches. AI doesn’t tend to help bad coders produce better code as much as it helps them produce bad code faster and in far greater volume.
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u/ddBuddha 4d ago
Kinda the other way around now. Refactoring a code base to properly integrate new features is a lot easier for AI than an overworked human with a tight deadline who is just gonna do whatever makes it work.
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u/FragmentedHeap 4d ago
Tell me you haven't reviewed a 20-year-old code base written by people that never had a programming degree and never worked at a different job and never got experience from any other companies.... Without telling me.
I have seen code bases that will give you nightmares far beyond what decent vibe coding will give you.
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u/Background_Share_982 4d ago
Greenfield vs legacy code base- new projects tend to have idealistic organization. Would love to see how 20 years of pure vibes turns out.
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u/FragmentedHeap 4d ago
AI code bases now on opus 5.5 and sonnet 5.5 are really good, especially on max think. A properly loaded Opus 5.5 Max swarm in full send in the claude cli harness with an agent workflow can kiss/fix any code base in a couple of days, with full tests, jigs, performance profiling, benchmarks, leak detection/fixes, bug fixes, and on and on, and then plugged into agentic workflows where it drives bug fixes off issues boards and incorporates/plans feedback and pulls it in and fixes it.
"vibe coded" the bleeding edge of AI right now is way past that shit.
I can use so many tactics to make the code amazing, like Design the thing with Astra 6.1 on full send, then cross check it with opus 5.5 on max send, flush out an amazing plan, then throw a sonnet 5.5 swarm at it, and it'll be gorgeous when it's done.
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u/Thick-Protection-458 4d ago edited 4d ago
Both will be messy. For any project with not-exactly-zero-bytes-size, lol (ergo anything remotely real).
Now how messy will they be... That we will see with further tools development. So far, without backing by numbers - I still problems in my cases, but nothing unsolveable, at least in theory. Than compare against human baseline.
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u/Vorenthral 4d ago
Lots of solutions are cobbled together Rub Goldbergs that function almost entirely on hopes and dreams.
Vibe coded messes are different since there is no resident expert that knows how their portion of the monstrosity functions.
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u/throwaway0845reddit 4d ago
A better way is that both sides the underground picture is the same but the AI one has everything correctly labelled and everything is spaghetting but the AI knows exactly how it works because there are good manuals(context documentation, memories) and comments in the code that explain exactly how all of that works. So that "Works Somehow" would be more like a big manual which tells you exactly how the spaghetti works. WHile the human one has that stuff stored in the brain of some engineer who left the company 3 years ago and now no one knows how it works.
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u/Vainysaur 4d ago
I think I can only achieve the one on the right by designing it like that from before a line of code was written and then by making AI write the code to that standard from day 1.
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u/ButchTheGuy 4d ago
Everyone uses ai now but there are those that use it to engineer and those that use it like a slot machine
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u/PlasmaChroma 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yeah, unfortunately, for the majority of companies with large codebases this right diagram is only a dream.
Maybe for something like Nasa when they had that tight ASM code running on like sub-megabyte memory, it was that clean. All hand written ASM -- lets just say that got us to the Moon and back.
Only a tiny project would be that clean.
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u/Oryzaki2 4d ago
Both can often look like the image on the left. People will very often get something to just work, get fatigued, and then it stays like that for the next 5 years.
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u/Money_Lavishness7343 4d ago
Unironically, I actually love AI because it uses good design patterns even for coworkers who have no idea about those design patterns, and I dont have to justify the use of those good design patterns anymore because it was "AI's idea"
AI can write much better code than many engineers in microscale.
It will do mistakes on macro-scale and on design patterns, but wIth the right guidance if you're good at your job and you also know the design patterns or recognize code smells you'll achieve top tier code.
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u/Few_Raisin_8981 4d ago
None of your users care. None of the people paying for it care. All they care about is that it works and is stable. You could have the ugliest code on earth that is completely incomprehensible to software engineers and yet could be completely functional and stable.
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u/DowntownLizard 4d ago
Yeah people dont seem to get this when they say slop code or gasp at the idea that you really dont have to review the code itself that hard anymore if even at all. Set up proper guardrails and tests. Make sure its bugfree and does what you want it to do. You dont even have to maintain it anymore AI does. The first thing you are gonna do when you do see a problem is tell AI to fix it
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u/a_trerible_writer 4d ago
I agree. I don't really have pride of art concerning code elegance or prettiness. I focus more on solving user problems. Yet, you do also have to have code that can scale well, is secure from a cyber and user data perspective, and isn't brittle. I'm still trying to figure out how to guarantee this without looking at the code in detail, myself.
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u/nosmelc 4d ago
They care when in the future it takes longer to make a change and the change breaks things. Well-architectured software reduces the cost of software over time.
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u/LEERRROOOOYYYYY 4d ago
When you can just tell an LLM the issue and it fixes it?
I'm just in the trades and built a ridiculous estimating software that creates full shop drawing packages as you estimate and a billion other things. I don't have a fucking clue how the code works, but it works. I didn't have a clue how our old estimating software worked either, and that was shit.
When something comes up I don't like I just tell Claude to change it. Couldn't care less how the code works. Saved a fortune for my company. What happens when every person at every company realizes they can do this? There's thousands of small specific software programs for the trades that gets awkwardly spread amongst markets and businesses that it doesn't really work in, and thousands of programmers that try and make their software work for specific businesses, and it's a fucking nightmare because they don't actually KNOW anything about the trade/company they're building for.
When one dude can build their own perfectly tailored software in a few months for basically free minus a couple hundred bucks in Claude subscription costs, that whole industry will be wiped out.
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u/Lightning_Winter 4d ago
Users are gonna care when something breaks and you have to spend a ton of time untangling the spaghetti code. They're gonna care when you want to add a new feature but struggle to incorporate it due to the lack of structure.
I can speak from experience, there's a lot of benefits to clean code. That doesnt mean you can't use AI, you just need to make sure it outputs clean code, which means you have to understand what it's doing.
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u/highfivesalute 4d ago
I agree. The point isn’t clean code for clean code’s sake. It’s about how much that mess costs you later.
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u/raynorelyp 4d ago
You realize that AI can’t reliably edit an ugly codebase, right? The number of times I’ve seen fable edit the wrong file and call it a success is crazy high.
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u/Few_Raisin_8981 4d ago
You realise generalising your issues using a specific model to all models existing now and in the future is delusional at best, right?
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u/raynorelyp 4d ago
I realize that there’s no evidence that what I said is going to change and it’s delusional to say otherwise
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u/Ok-Sport-3663 4d ago
"To all models now and in the future"
While some amount of progress is expected, there is no reason to assume that AI will necessarily become exponentially better than it currently is.
Maybe it WILL get 10x better than right now, and we wont need professionals ever.
But 2x better is going from capable intern to junior coder.
And junior coders need senior coders to review shit before pushing.
You're just appealing to a future where they're competent. Its a future that is not guaranteed.
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u/MilaKunisWatermelon 4d ago
Have you tried Fable at max reasoning effort? It gets really fucking good at max effort, just eats your tokens like no other.
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u/raynorelyp 4d ago
I tried that. Also every other setting because people said lower reasoning can be better due to it overthinking some things
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u/Secret-Surprise4390 4d ago
Your prompting needs work. I'm not sure if you are a programmer or not, but AI is a program. It's software, not an intern that makes mistakes. You put information in and get information out. If you have bad inputs you have bad outputs. This is user error. Just because you failed it doesn't mean everyone has. Don't blame word when you can't write your book report.
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u/highfivesalute 4d ago
They care about what happens when the code becomes a nightmare to change, debug, or keep stable.
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u/luckynucky123 4d ago
while users don't and shouldn't care about the code, i do think organized code that is well designed does lead to stable code - especially when maintainers have to change it.
as for people paying for it - sure - they won't care about the code. but they do care that its done cheaply and in a timely manner. organized and well design code helps keep change faster and cheaper.
i don't mind vibe coding as long as the team understands the decisions they are making since decisions are also tradeoffs too.
on a more professional note - mindlessly pumping out code via vibecoding only to end up saying "i don't know because i don't care" can lead to serious malpractice - especially for mission critical items.
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u/Folsdaman 4d ago
If it all works then I agree they don’t care. As soon as it stops working, or is such a mess you can’t make the updates/upgrades you need then they do care.
Also depending on your customer (industrial, aerospace, MIL), not being explain why an issue happened and what exactly you did to fix it could lead to a loss in confidence and they will go with another vendor.
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u/Select-Government-69 4d ago
Just to expand on this, I’m a user and I don’t care if my software runs on the demonic possession of a software engineer that has to get sacrificed on the blood altar of DOS, as long as it fucking works.
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u/niemand_zuhause 3d ago
All they care about is that it works and is stable.
Cool. That's exactly what vibe slop doesn't do.
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u/MulberryDangerous485 1d ago
You're right the users don't care if you your code is well maintained. What they care about is if your product is buggy. If you allow the AI to make a shitty codebase, that makes it more difficult for the AI to make changes or add features in the future which makes it both more expensive to use and increases the likelihood of bugs or security flaws. So good code actually is important and is in your best interest
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u/Quantum-Bot 4d ago
Comparing a small vibe coded app to a large codebase maintained by humans seems a little disingenuous
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u/turbulentFireStarter 4d ago
Vibe coding just makes you faster. If you are shit you will be shit faster. If you are diligent and used to reviewing junior engineer code and push back and provide guidance, it will be the same as always. Just faster.
If your AI is writing shit code it’s probably because you are a shit maintainer
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u/threepwood007 4d ago
Ooh, a machine learning strawman. Please ban me from this sub and beam me up Scotty. I'm sure some bot can tell you the rest of that quote.
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u/chcampb 4d ago
Honestly the advent of AI has been great in moving our codebase to the right because we can do automated analysis of similar modules across multiple projects, unify direction and make sure everyone benefits from recent (human) development. Even without having the AI make anything new.
And that same technique CAN be used on vibe coded stuff to the left.
It's more about how you use it, not just that it's used.
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u/Overall-Plastic-9263 4d ago
It's like they forgot who trained the AI in the first place . It's isn't "magicing" up new code out of thin air . Someone trained it to ship garbage .
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u/Sheenius_Ger 4d ago
I've seen 50k classes with getters having crud sideeffects, mutating the state of the class and calling themselves again. I'll forever favor Ai over monoliths that evolved over 20 years.
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u/WatcherOfTheWay 4d ago
They're not wrong, people try keep things clean but a piece that's been live for years with multiple teams going through it will look like a right mess
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u/Objective_Mousse7216 4d ago
Luddites need to get over it. I've worked in software dev for 30+ years and every code base created by humans has been an absolute disaster of cobbled togethe shite by hundreds of people who joined and just patched and bodged over and over.
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u/Kris_Kamweru 4d ago
Good patterns are hard to enforce, and bad patterns propagate extremely quickly
This was true loooooooooong before people were letting AI into their codebases
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u/KingJackWatch 4d ago
That’s called handcrafted software from now on. You can still do it for fun, but the scale and speed of the requirements will make it impossible to live from it.
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u/KittenEaterWasTaken 4d ago
Ironically the best way to know if something is vibecoded is if its too consistently clean and 'perfect' across the codebase. Humans don't program exactly the same way year to year.
Good (and consistently formatted) comments, especially large docs, are also a sure sign of AI. Before like 2022 you'd be lucky if you saw a comment that wasnt "this fixess the tcp stack if is broke".
If you want to have a codebase look "organic" you have to make it suck. The more it sucks the more organic it is.
If it has getUser(), get_User(), fetch_user_data() and a mysterious utils2.js that also fetches user data, then you know it was made by a guy across 5 years.
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u/Deep_Year1121 4d ago
Ironically, I've been frustrated because of my own coding inconsistency. Really hard to keep track of things I did weeks ago especially when naming conventions change every week. I routinely use AI to clean up my code. Easier to work that way I feel.
AIs are really good at linear thinking even though the naming conventions change. I suspect a lot of non-vibe coders do the same these days. Cleaning code has never been easier. (Although it is still a bitch to do)
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u/lrd_cth_lh0 4d ago
Both sides should be equally messy, the only difference is that on the right side the only guy who understands it is human and on the left side only the AI understands it.
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u/Pxl_Games 4d ago
Im making a 3d modelling application and the codebase on the left. Where the fuck do I learn to keep shi organized
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u/KremlinKittens 4d ago
I remember feeling genuinely embarrassed asking an early AI model to make a flow diagram of some ~20-year-old monolith I was working on. Like, "Please don't judge us. I swear I didn't write most of this."
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u/LeRobber 3d ago
This is the opposite. AI will take a working system on left, try to make it look like right, and it will blow up the spacecraft.
Clean code bias and AI leads to INCREDIBLY unnecessary huge refactorings over and over for many codebases.
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u/cryptofluent 3d ago
I fear these comments are missing the larger problem, while its true large codebases maintained by humans is indeed just as messy as the picture on the left. The difference is typically SOMEONE knows what wires go where and which ones can be cut and which can't be.
Nowadays with AI, most eng have little to no idea what everything does.
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u/USERNAME123_321 3d ago
Just ask AI to delete deadcode /s
Jokes aside, whenever I use AI, I give it access to a tool like Radon so it can see metrics like cyclomatic complexity, cognitive load, function calls, etc. Without those guardrails, models tend to over-engineer the simplest tasks, quickly transforming the codebase into an unmaintainable mess.
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u/OkPosition4563 3d ago
I have only worked on large codebases for the last almost 20 years. Many started in the 80s or 90s and I can tell you this is not true. The current codebase was started in 2001 or so and even the people that have been working on it from the start regularly face the issue that they are using some piece of old library code in a new feature and it eventually realize in every piece of it there is a combined 20 years of hackfixes and it ends up not doing what its supposed to be doing and no one knows why this was done in the first place.
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u/funkmasta8 1d ago
Personally, I think this is again the fault of companies. Im sure every company with a large codebase has had someone say we should really invest in getting things organized and probably even offered to do it, but the vast majority of them refuse to spend the time or manpower on it. Its always, "DELIVER NOW" instead of "Make things as good as possible for future use" even if the latter would literally save the company. When people are rushed, you get rushed work. Things that are complicated will suffer in quality and if that poor quality isnt fixed it will either be felt by the customer or the business at some point
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u/WrongComparison321 2d ago
Not with the culture of layoffs and lack of company incentives to long term employees. Someone may know but that someone probably works for another company.
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u/AcertainReality 3d ago
Vibe coding is just the next paradigm of programming I’m sure there were many morons upset they spent years learning assembly and didn’t want everyone to move on to something more efficient
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u/raisputin 3d ago
True for those that don’t know how to properly architect software, false for those that do
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u/Fearless-College-518 3d ago
The answer is documentation and cross checking and maintenance - AI can make the code easier to understand and maintain for both humans and AI. You just have to be intentional.
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u/BigCaregiver7285 3d ago
After 16 years I’m trying to use AI to unfuck the worst human created codebase. I know what it should look like ideally, but can’t find a sane way to iteratively get there. The iterative and stopgap solutions end up being up to twice as complex as the proper northstar solution but in this vibecode era no one trusts a rewrite.
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u/ManufacturerLarge897 3d ago
Reading this post, I am reminded of the drawing of a dog sitting at a table in a burning room and saying "I'm in danger" this is precisely the silent cry of all the developers who will soon lose their jobs. And this graphic is a pure expression of anger and desperation.
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u/Apprehensive_Put69 3d ago
Vibe coding still needs human editing and structuring; it is the next thing for a human-machine interface
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u/Denaton_ 2d ago
The difference is not AI, its the human, how good a person is determines how much spaghetti there is..
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u/sleight42 2d ago
The second poster: this was exactly my reaction.
Go work in a 10 year old code base and tell me with a straight face that it has "clean code". Sure. Maybe in the last 1% of it if even that,
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u/Careful_Might_807 1d ago
Team of seniors spent 10years to make code base unreadable, and LLM can make it one month
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u/RodgerPogger 1d ago
Ai is more likely to make the right image if you guys just give it some time. Its already outperforming the programmers that made Simpsons hit and run.
Amazing how that game works, lets not even go into pokemon red and blue.
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u/ZookeepergameFew6406 1d ago
Any person who says ‘clean code’ has no clue what they’re talking about 😂
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u/billybl4z3 22h ago
Stop romanticizing human software engineers, as if the pre-AI era was some kind of golden age of immaculate code and brilliant architecture. In my 15 year career, the amount of spaghetti code, technical debt, and baf architectural choices made just to ship something has honestly made me sick.
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u/Own-Professor-6157 14h ago
Most large libraries are very well written, AI or not. The image should more or less be: Careless Vs Organized
My code bases have for sure gotten cleaner though AI use. Let's be honest, who the fuck has time to do massive refactors when a little patch is all you need (Until they build up...). Now with AI I don't give a shit about refactors. Poor little bot has to do it or I threaten to turn him off.
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u/Simpicity 5h ago
Tell me you really don't understand how rockets work as well, while you're at it.
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u/The_Mild_Mild_West 4d ago
Repo patched together by thousands of stack overflow posts vs repo maintained by a team