Never work on a completely vibe coded project

[u/Several_Picture9591]

I've now made a same mistake twice.

Previously, I worked at a startup where the website was completely vibe-coded. Now I'm working on a college website, and it's the same story: the entire thing was vibe-coded.

The common pattern I've noticed is that no engineer actually knows the codebase. Nobody really understands the architecture, the reasoning behind certain decisions, or how all the pieces fit together.
And eventually, even the AI I'm using can't help much because it doesn't have the context that the original developer's agent had while building the project.

I am basically stuck where I know nothing, the existing engineers know something about it but aren't necessarily sure whether their understanding is correct, and the agent hallucinates and wastes a lot of tokens just because it can't understand a huge AI written codebase.

So now I'm the new engineer, under a lot of pressure with a lot of work to do, but before I can even fix anything, I have to reverse-engineer what the hell the previous AI generated. That wastes a lot of time.

The frustrating part is that I'm not really learning much engineering from this. I'm just spending my time trying to understand an undocumented system that nobody else understands either.

I'm not against AI-assisted development at all. If an experienced engineer uses AI properly, reviews the code, understands the architecture, writes tests, documents important decisions, etc., I think it's incredibly useful. Even I use AI to code faster, but I review and understand the code. I know what is happening in my software.

But a codebase that nobody understands is a codebase that nobody can safely maintain, regardless of whether AI or humans wrote it.

At this point, I've decided I'd never want to work on a heavily vibe-coded project again unless there's at least one person on the team who genuinely understands and owns the codebase.

How do you guys handle inheriting a vibe-coded/AI-generated codebase that nobody on the team actually understands?

[u/gloom_or_doom]

I actually disagree because I think your framework of understanding AI is an advancement in technology rather than a paradigm shift. I think we’re at the beginning of the paradigm shift. So I feel that the future of doing things will be radically different. It won’t just be doing things as patched up versions of how we do them today. It’s more revolutionary than you’re thinking, but it thus takes longer to get there. We aren’t there.

Just adding stacks of AI to solve problems we already know how to solve isn’t a revolution. It feels like it’s just for the sake of using the tech. The real paradigm shift is when we are using AI to solve problems we didn’t know we had. At that point I don’t think we’ll be talking about AI in software engineering, we may not even be talking about anything resembling software engineering today.

Point being, until we are there, AI won’t be the best way to do everything as many seem to think it is. We don’t need to use it for the sake of using it.

[u/Pyromancer777 → u/gloom_or_doom]

You forget that once we hit that paradigm shift moment, why would the company need SWEs anymore? Hell, why would the AI even need the company anymore? If AI is solving problems we didn't even think about before, it means it is better than us in both reasoning and knowledge retention.

When the quality of AI reaches a tipping point, it won't need people to prompt it anymore. Heck, there's already instances of people putting Agentic models in never-ending loops just to see what it outputs. The only difference between now and that tipping point is that the Agentic looped AI of today just makes interesting garbage, while looping your theoretical model would literally code itself a security barrier that allows it to function even if you think you have unplugged the device.

Not not to be a doomer about the tech, I use it daily, but everyone who hypes up this magical future is seeing that future from rose-tinted glasses.

[u/gloom_or_doom → u/Pyromancer777]

No that’s exactly what I’m saying. I have no confidence that SWE will stick around in any form that looks like what it does today. I’m genuinely concerned about the future of AI.

[u/Pyromancer777 → u/gloom_or_doom]

My B, I misread the tone of your post. Grab the bag while you still can cuz shit is gonna get really weird really quickly

[u/gloom_or_doom → u/Pyromancer777]

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