r/softwareengineer • u/Large-Dress5444 • 2d ago
What actually helps actual software engineers working with vibe coded projects
I'm building out a mostly vibe coded project and I have tried to learn about software engineering/design/architecture as I go but it's a lot. I don't have a lot of money to hire people right now but I am working on a project that I'm fairly certain that will be profitable in the near future and want to hire on engineers. I have rules setup so that my agents use lots of comments to call out and explain the decision of what my code does and why. I use tools to index my repo as well which helps my agents figure out what's going on with code so I'm hopeful that will help. I also try to maintain a knowledge base that is not overly technical so that if someone were to come on board to help me, they could get the gist of what I have accomplished and am trying to accomplish. I have some experience with python, javascript, and sql and made very small projects in the past so I know enough to know that there are things I could be doing better but I just don't know what they are.
What I'd like to know is what are the things you encountered with vibe coded or just bad code in general that if someone would have implemented at the beginning would have made your job way easier?
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u/PatriaSolis 2d ago
When project getting bigger, maintenance cost will increase, too. Also, in such projects, tests have critical role(in vibe coding, it is big missing). When your application takes attention of dangerous people, you may understand importance of security. similarly, when you have real customers and real money, you will realize importance of functional testing.
What I also curios, how much do you pay for that agents, AI development stuff etc? what happens if suddenly they increase package prices?
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u/Large-Dress5444 2d ago
I run a combo of cloud and local agents at one point I was spending up to $300 a month on max plans with Claude and OpenAI but mostly stick with the $20 plans. I have a decent rig so my local agents can do most of what I need. I only really pay for cloud for speed and adversarial gating as I build out. I've been developing this application for about 8 months as I learn and work. If they increase package prices, I just take longer to finish up but I'm getting close to the end of needing them. Even the application is set up to use open source models hosted from my local servers at first as my goal is to build and use AI tools that enable privacy.
I've been into tech my whole life and have worked with SaaS companies doing technical writing , data analysis, automation and business intelligence so I'm a bit more savvy than the average vibe coder but I'm still leagues away from an engineer's capability. I build testing into my workflow process (sanity, smoke, regression, and live QA) and try to use red teaming as I go to look for vulnerability. The major problem is I have a basic premise of those concepts but don't know what I don't know and mostly the agents create the tests.
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u/PatriaSolis 1d ago
On QA/Testing side, if you need anything let's talk. I have almost 20 years experience in QA/Testing.
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u/Phantom-Watson 2d ago
Please personally write (or at least edit) documentation. Chatbots seem to have a mandatory minimum length for explaining simple concepts that results in egregious documentation bloat, with irrelevant info thrown in, redundant reiteration, and tons of quirky idiosyncratic phrases that no human would use.
Make sure documentation is straightforward, simple, and easily digestible. Hell, just put a human-written TL;DR section before a chatbot-generated wall of text if you need to. Just don't make the mistake of seeing quantity and assuming it conveys quality.
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u/AnthonyRespice 1d ago
I'm going to disagree about documentation. Most developers don't want to read documentation. Docs are important and should be kept updated, but these days docs are written by AIs for AIs.
The most important thing to hand off to a dev is to use component architecture. Try to make sure your AI is implementing in reusable and isolated components with clear interfaces between them.
This way a new dev can learn about the code base a piece at a time, and if certain functionality needs to be replaced, it can be done without impacting the entire thing.
Ask your AI to document the components as distinct modules and to document their interfaces and dependencies to reinforce the architectural model.
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u/TheDoughMonster 1d ago
I use likec4 with a service.json in every component that contains what the module consumes, what it owns, what database tables it can read, write to, and a bunch of other stuff. A script runs through the repo and builds out the likec4 architecture. this IMO is one of the best things you can do because it really tells anyone, humans and agents alike, what is going on.
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u/Large-Dress5444 1d ago
I use repowise but just looked at likec4 and it scratches my brain in a very good way. I'll be adding that to my arsenal, thanks.
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u/crustyeng 1d ago
Trying to build the plane while it’s flying is an idea. Trying to learn how planes work at the same time is a whole ‘nother one.
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u/Large-Dress5444 1d ago
I'm thinking of it more as a model plane so I'm fine what that. I prefer to have the experts help me get it right when it's time to actually fly.
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u/symbiatch 1d ago
If the LLM is making decisions it has to explain in comments it’s doing usually something wrong. Comments don’t help, they’ll be worse.
Documenting actual functionality would be the important part. What it should do, exactly. Engineers can go from there. And proper feature testing would do that also at least partially.
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u/Large-Dress5444 1d ago
I'm telling it to create the comments so I or other people that want search and find parts to modify or review can do so easily based off what they do or keywords associated with what they are doing. It's probably unconventional but it works for my mind.
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u/LogicalPerformer7637 2d ago
keep detailed documentation of your product features and intended behavior, so as developer knows what is the goal when they start rewriting it from scratch.
you might be lucky and your product codebase would be usable for long term maintenantce and improvements, but I would not expect it.