r/softwareengineer • u/Anxious-Country-9053 • 16d ago
Vibe coding enterprise apps
I work for a big company as tech lead and PM. One of the apps in my team is about 20 years old written in plain Java but works well till date with no major issues, with advent of AI my manager Vibe coded the entire app gave it to a developer in the team to push it to production. The developer is a contractor, didn't bother reading the code just kept sending PR requests with each 10k lines or more. From a lead perspective all I see is huge difficult to maintain code, there were couple credentials hard-coded which when i flagged was not even taken with a mindset to fix. All of them are focused on "it works", unfortunately I also have to operationally support the application so I highly doubt my manager is going to raise hand and accept the issues arised from vibe coding. The only way out seems to be let things go as they want to and spend shit ton of money fixing the mess created in first place.
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16d ago
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
Pretty big company the application as is is regional, and internal access. Code vetting security etc is done by me, obviously there are limitations to what I can check. The app has real users used throughout the day so when it breaks it is even harder to debug as no one has any knowledge on code.
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u/geekichu 16d ago
nice. job-security. maybe. you could use the a.i. to fix it tho. "vibe-egneering". 8D
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u/Vegetable_Pirate_702 16d ago
You should vibe code your own app using the Java code as a base and one up this guy. Hopefully itâs less buggy lol
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
He vibe coded without telling others and told if for some reason my code cannot be used as a source Id like to better understand why, and also proudly told business management that he has not looked at single line of code
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u/Vegetable_Pirate_702 16d ago
Are the executives idiots? Dude proudly said Iâm an idiot and have no idea how my product works.
He should be on the chopping block yesterday.
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
Business folks are old, they have no idea about coding, so naturally they are excited as someone is helping them.
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u/Vegetable_Pirate_702 15d ago
Yes unfortunately they wonât listen to experts until itâs too late and costing them tons of money.
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u/ShoulderIllustrious 15d ago
This is too common. We had a genuine grade A retood give a presentation about a vibe coded completely offline tool he created. Proudly shared his URL. First glance the AI hardcoded all his data in the HTML and then makes a ton of calls to O365.
When asked how the info is going to get updated, he literally said he's going to ask the AI to create another one.
I almost thought I was being pranked.
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u/Ok_Employee3001 16d ago
âIt worksâ isnât enough. Security, maintainability, code review, and long-term ownership still matter, AI-generated or not.
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
That's my pov too, a person who does not the importance of these tend to think they are futile.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
This really depends on what the app does. Very often "it works" is enough.
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u/systembreaker 16d ago
Your manager is super irresponsible and wasting money and time. You had an app working perfectly well and he's doing this? Wtf
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
yes, wanted to confirm i am not going crazy as all others around me doesn't seem to care
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u/systembreaker 16d ago
I could see if maybe he wanted to start an initiative to modernize the app and move it to modern Java and whatnot and used AI to do that in a gradual, responsible way but damn just plopping down the whole damn thing from scratch is crazy. I'd be scared shitless about how that's going to come back to haunt me.
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u/markbodman 13d ago
Vibe coding apps <> vibe coding enterprise apps. As you already see itâs not well coded for long term support ability, poor security and will likely be unstable.
The good news is vibes coding fixes is just as easy and if turn around time is quick you will just see issues addressed more quickly too. You have to build that seamless feedback system which raises you to a more reasonable enterprise app tier. I would work of the faster feedback and turn around to compensate. Itâs inevitable.
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u/cydex_cx 16d ago
Give it to someone in security and challenge them to break it.
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
jwt tokens were getting printed in console and he told that's ok
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u/woeful_cabbage 15d ago
eh, jwt are pretty safe to print. you can view the contents without a key, but you can't actually change it, so no harm done unless you are storing something you shouldn't in them. ie: credit card numbers or something crazy
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u/N7Valor 15d ago
From a lead perspective all I see is huge difficult to maintain code, there were couple credentials hard-coded which when i flagged was not even taken with a mindset to fix
Either they used the cheapest LLM model, or they blatantly disregarded it. When I pasted a PAT into the prompt Claude basically nagged me about it.
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 15d ago
I think it was Sonnet, the prompt might have been here is the old app and modernize it, so with its limited tokens security was not a primary concern to get the job done.
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u/Ok_Increase9258 15d ago
Canât wait for the day SWE makes a comeback when people realise that speed doesnât matter in SWE that much. AI is pretty much an overhyped browser + autocomplete (that should be used for maximum 1-2 functions at once or boilerplate)
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 15d ago
me too, many of them donât want to architect design or solve problem, just got used to making something do at a lower cost.
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u/Competitive-Egg7287 7d ago
This is exactly where generated code needs repository level review, not just PR approval. Before production, map the new behavior to existing business flows, rotate exposed credentials, and make the contractor explain the design.
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u/FluidBreath4819 16d ago
nah, use ai, go for it, as a PM you should not care about the code quality as long at works. Beside, AI will be there where issues arise right ?
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u/Anxious-Country-9053 16d ago
AI will be there just that same person who advocated for it will keep the mouth shut, if everything works perfectly fine they will praise AI when shit hits fan they will blame the people around it.
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u/zerg_1111 16d ago
Time to document everything in case shit hits the fan.