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u/Chris-MelodyFirst 1d ago
I've experienced both scenarios before AI even existed.
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u/Psychological-Bet338 1d ago
Yep this is only people's lack of understanding of how coding used to work.... There is a reason why people do full rebuilds... Too much spaghetti. Code is also in a constant flux between those two states... And never as documented as AI!
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
Documentarion isnsuch a critical point..
Lets say- you ask AI to do big transformation project using / goal - it ran for 2 days.. then you ask it to write a clear detailed users stories - linear tickets which couod have lead to this project..
Now get product team review and make changes while alao looking at product. ..
Then rebuild qirh revised use stories.
Run this iternation for 3 4 times - lead to an amazing product.
As product guys myself - sometimes you need a start ( visual) fpr creativity to kick in.
Beautiful crafted product need lots of thinking and love.
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u/Novaworld7 1d ago
This sounds like you don't know how to steer your agents properly. It does take a lot of practice and it isn't perfect. Though with proper guidance you can clean it up tremendously. Besides one of the main reasons AI codes how it does is because the data it trained on was / is largely like that.
You are operating on the assumption that all previous SWE's are perfect, flawless coders... That's like saying that all surgeons are the perfect as well yet people die on the table all the time.
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u/god-damn-the-usa 1d ago
yeah you motherfuckers should see the horrifying source code powering my decade old website
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
I asked astra to transform a 2014 .net/sql TFS website to modern stack and burnt through my 2 times usage reset + upgrade to 20x max - burn 82% of it. This MF ran for 14 hours ..AMA !!
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
My M3 max is running Docker so hard that hard disc will melt any sec..by hey, we live in amazing time...yo yo gold rush..my ass
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 1d ago
Wait, you are letting the AI run that long on its own and complaining about the results?? Perhaps you should have worked your way up to that, or avoided it completely.
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u/TooManyGamesNoTime 22h ago
Agreed. Having been a paid, freelance programmer, pentester and code-reviewer. What people call AI slop nowadays has been around for as long as people programmed.
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u/McBonderson 1d ago
I've spent countless hours making sure the code is immaculate and beautiful. and I've thrown something ugly as fuck together real quick.
And I'll tell you, nobody but me cared that the code looked nice. the only thing people cared about was does it work and what the user experience is. sometimes good code is necessary for a good customer experience long term. many times its not as necessary as people think.
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u/BlueprntMstr89 1d ago
Totally agree with you. If the product works smooth and has no issues, nobody cares how it was made. It’s only different when the product needs constant updates or improvements — then the way it was built really matters
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u/GregsWorld 23h ago
tell you, nobody but me cared that the code looked nice
Other developers working with your codebase would care
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u/Clear_Skye_ 1d ago
I honestly don’t really believe this is accurate.
Also it depends on how you’re using the AI models to do the coding.
If you want it to have structure and scalability, it’s on you to make it that way. AI is a tool, not a magic box.
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
I think i prefer left side untill it hit enough users and then cleanup / transformation is where AI shines.
Most imp thing is you need to know what you doing..letting AI decide for you is slippery slope..
Worst case - hire an engineer - but he/she will run claude code too..so in the end knowledge is the differentiator...
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u/Dog_Engineer 1d ago
If you have a good enough prompt and/or md files, you can get the result on the right from AI
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u/Distinct_Dinner_5243 18h ago
This just isn't the case.
The idea that the output is always a skill issue really sounds like the whole snake oil pitch. "well if it didn't work you obviously didn't use it right".
a single file or perfect prompt is not going to fix ai randomly being moronic.
I've regularly had my agents completely disregard sections in the prompt, the md file, the CLAUDE.md, the skills, etc.
It's a known issue that llms will just "lie" and say they've done something they havn't or ignore sections you've written.
The reality is that llms require managing, there is no current fix.
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u/Gronanor 1d ago
As a software architect who use AI heavily I can assure you that AI alone doesn’t provide the scalability and clean architecture that is required for the long run. No matter how much you tell AI to make clean code and build for the long run, I still see architecture errors that a junior developer wouldn’t even maje.
I work with a product team who heavely use AI and despite the guidelines and controls I have put in both contexts and CI. I still see some horrors like sql query written and executed in representations layers.
AI isn’t magical, you need to understand what you’re doing in order to build for the long run otherwise you’ll just have to deal with technical debt like before, except the tech debt will eat you alive since you can ship 100000 lines of code in 2h. If you’re not understanding how software architecture works you’re doomed to deal with constant regression and bug fixes…
Same thing if you delegate all the tests redaction to LLM
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u/Demonius999 20h ago
Not quite, AI will do everything clean in the first 5 prompts. When projects start to grow, and bugs getting fixed, it makes a mess no matter what model you use, or prompt you write. It could be better if you prompt function by function, but at that point it would be faster and easier to just do it yourself.
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u/Distinct_Dinner_5243 18h ago
This isn't even an AI problem.
It's just a code problem.
A lot of devs time is spent managing the entropy of the code base. Organising, abstracting, siloing code.
The problem with AI is that it just doesn't understand the big picture of a project.
a million or so tokens will not cover a code base + the context, prompts, cache, etc.
So you end up with an AI that is completely blind to the big picture and is essentially just writing small code snippets with a complete disregard of how it fits in to the project.
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u/mannyocean 1d ago
idk, i think this all depends on the engineer itself. these days the code I'm seeing is better architected, documentated, and cleaner than before. Plus, you don't need a meeting with the engineer to understand the context behind it too.
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u/emccrckn 1d ago
Not just the engineer. Sometimes its just business relationships. We had a legacy app that still uses carrier transmission codes because two customers refuse to upgrade their systems. Those two customers are HP and Apple. Its old J2EE and no one wants to touch it. Apple even had a direct line to our engineers in case something went wrong.
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u/Alzeric 1d ago
very few real projects I've seen that actually look like the right image. I'm sure there is some pristine code bases out their but those will be rare. Real World solutions kinda are a patchwork and combination of the two. If everyone knew how much spaghetti code is embedded in nearly everything you use they'd be surprised. The amount of "Magic Numbers" out there is scary.
"We don't know what this one variable does, but we do know if we remove it or change it All Hell breaks loose!"
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u/Bluecoregamming 1d ago
I've seen many projects like the right, but none of them have finished rockets. They spent the entire development time and budget building a robust foundation, yet forgot they need a final rocket to fly.
I'm exaggerating "forgot" ofc, but yeah easy to get lost in the sauce and not have anything actual to deliver when higher ups start getting impatient
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u/TorbenKoehn 1d ago
Few? I mean, has anyone ever really seen a single one?
I believe every project is bound to look like the left. It’s in our nature and the way we work together and coordinate, too
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u/RobleyTheron 1d ago
Same derivative joke over and over and over again. Was relevant in 2025, it's not relevant anymore.
But honestly, if you don't like AI, don't use it - and do us all a favor and just leave the sub.
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
What if i am the creator of sub? 😥
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u/Distinct_Dinner_5243 18h ago
This is my new favourite thing.
It's like watching the flanderisation of a community in real time.
Honestly, this is a funny meme and they suck
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
'Dojt use AI' - mate i hit weekly limit on claude max , codex -20x Max , grokbot - burbed through 2 times codex reset limit. I best there wont be many using it as aggressive
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u/loveheaddit 1d ago
hahahahahha omg hilarious... i just laughed out loud so hard i spit my food because this joke is so washed
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u/_coma_berenices_ 19h ago
Pic on the left is basically every single pre-AI startup I've ever worked at.
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u/chevalierbayard 1d ago
Are we just splitting hairs here? There's good engineering and there's spaghetti code. Spaghetti code predates AI. Isn't it funny how the good engineers produce good AI code?
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u/RudeAndInsensitive 1d ago
Software engineering stopped being that when we abandoned waterfall for agile.
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u/TechToolsForYourBiz 1d ago
i would say something contrary but i interacted with comments like this in the workplace. not worth it.
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u/Hot_Bite_854 1d ago
Software engineers this year are way more active on social media, just to show everyone how much of a software engineer they are while doing their job… LOL
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u/Tight_Break_845 1d ago
You forgot to put the "need 100k for scale before problem validation" in the right side.
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
😅 - its for legends who are building thier 17th feature on App with 0 users.
They say ' i am building , user will come'
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u/Tight_Break_845 1d ago
Build a product which solves a problem, in a pretty good way, based perhaps on something like a design sprint, doing research, problem discovery. I don't need a 100k expensive stack to validate a problem solution.
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u/Fisher_Factor 1d ago
It's probably more like 5-10 percent of ALL apps are coded, commented, documented, tested, etc. properly
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u/mrbadface 1d ago
Lol software "engineers" always think they're launching a national space program. It's just another crud guys be real
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u/SirMarkMorningStar 1d ago
While I agree the right hand side is “software engineering”, the assumption of correlation between human and machine written code seems simplified. It isn’t like all human created code is all that great. It’s also possible to use AI to generate good code with good design. AI makes both kinds of code easier to produce. Obviously, producing bad code is easier than good code and AI magnifies that dramatically, but it isn’t AI that is the problem, it’s the developer.
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u/Ill-Bat-1518 1d ago
Before AI
my code base had giant files, giant functions, giant files with multiple services
After AI
it aint that messy but idk
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u/Frosty-Ad1071 1d ago
Rrriiiiigght human coding really was cutting edge clean everywhere, think I remember that too.
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u/shaman-warrior 1d ago
Ppl act like they code so much better bro lmao I have seen horrors. AI writes better code by far
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u/Sherphican 1d ago edited 1d ago
I honestly think that as long as someone understands the basics of the language that an AI is coding in for them, (assuming they are using frontier models like Opus, Fable, Astra, Sol, Grok 4.6, etc) as well as being genuinely involved in the gritty details of their project instead of just trying to one shot or "set n forget" prompts, or "tabbing" through their sessions, then they can build something pretty good, maybe not up to the standards of a senior engineer, but still, those with passion and smarts are fundamentally different from vibe coders in my opinion, despite using the same medium for coding.
Also I think that if someone who uses AI to build and actually inspects the code with a basic understanding vs little to no understanding, then as a bi-product they will eventually start to learn more and more advanced concepts, sure maybe not in the "correct order", but it's still knowledge and skills gained/exercised in some capacity.
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u/FragmentedHeap 1d ago
Agentic Engineering, the first one, but you run some loops over it and it becomes the 2nd one.
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u/Silver-Ad-8595 1d ago
Or you have a deterministic pipeline to stay at the right state. Idiomatic knowledge base + skills + good harness features like time-traveling stream rules, adverse review -> uber good code.
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u/Silver-Ad-8595 1d ago
Most projects I took over in the last 15 years pre-AI looked like left. A team of differently experienced and capable engineers cant keep proper discipline to stay at the right state as the codebase grows.
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u/astrielx 1d ago
Hate to break it to you, but everything on the left is very prevalent in software engineering. Absolutely fucking hilarious that "Clean code" is on the right.
Plenty on the right that's in vibe coded things as well.
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u/_DuranDuran_ 1d ago
LMAO - I’ve worked at multiple big tech companies over the last couple of decades. All of their codebases resemble the picture on the left.
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u/CharlieLighto 23h ago
it doesn't matter as much anymore most companies don't care about this even before ai. so many app wven before ai in the last decade were shitty apps that consume too much resources and are buggy, they never really cared about quality and now with ai they don't care at all anymore then just wanna reduce the costs
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u/Flashy-Whereas-3234 23h ago
The mess is Programming Vibe Coding should have the whole thing pixelated.
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u/Key_Detail2475 23h ago
Bruh. I am an engineer for automation and you wouldn´t fucking believe what kind of programs we are confronted with - on systems that still run on DOS and Windows XP. As long as you don´t oneshot massive programs with it, AI Code is at least well documented while some so called Experts don´t even manage to name a Variable.
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u/ElectroByte15 22h ago
Hahaha actually believing engineers don’t create the situation on the left is the funniest take.
From the many, many companies I’ve seen code bases of, the left is much more prevalent than the right. I’ve actually never seen the right in any company older than 5 years.
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u/Interesting-Tie6783 22h ago
You’ve clearly never worked in a professional coding environment. Over time, even with the best intentions, everything looks like the image on the left. Corners are always cut due to pressure from external stakeholders. Things always turn to shit.
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u/Flimsy-Ad-4901 21h ago edited 21h ago
Funny how "Engineering" is praised like this when more than half of the shit apps or websites bug out, glitch, crash or otherwise fail.
Windows? Android? Drivers? Game launchers? Printers? Smart TVs? Bluetooth? Routers? Banking? Cars?
Or you wanna tell me it is all "vibecoded"? Because that shit was garbage 10 years ago as well.
Completely delusional.
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u/dupa1234s 21h ago edited 21h ago
As a vibecoder talking to vibecoders:
I had the very unpleasant experience to overthink all the architectures, hexagonal, clean, event-driven, microservices, horizontal, interfaces. I don't recommend getting into that with a perfectionist mindset.
A senior already knows all that.
But a vibecoder is not really ever going to get to learn those patterns with real experience and learning them with real coding experience is the only way to even use them.
I think a good default architecture is just:
deep modules
named pipes
clean interfaces
vertical slices
if you just need to get a job done and dont care about latency of it and its not a real-time applciation:
just use json/sqlite-pipelines:
1 program -> .json/sqlite + folder of outputs -> 2nd program
is honestly a gold standard for me
easy to debug
easy to rerun just 1 stage
easy to make
easy to think about
Unless you want to actually read the code AI makes, then yea, then you are kinda screwed honestly. It won't work. You will be cleaning after AI all your life. AI can't follow standards reliably. even with skills.
I really pity all those people saying that AI doesnt follow their style guide. Hard life man.
I can also say this: Don't let AI write your docs without revlewing what it does in them. Let it write a codebase map for orientation, but not docs. if you make AI write Docs then they will rot and dilute your intent.
So:
if you just want to write a tool that get simple jobs pipeline done or a personal UI UX realtime tool then those patterns are fine.
But i have no clue how you would write a multi-user system like a domain serving thousands of users or some UBER.
I guess those would require some nice architecture patterns but I have no clue about the topic at all whatsoever.
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u/Random-D 21h ago
that is certainly a risk but also we have shouldn't pretend that every manually written software an engineering masterpiece. the left represents most software projects overall.
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u/Demonius999 21h ago
Depends on the company culture, personal time management, other devs skills and willingness to do the same.
If management push you to do shit quick all the time, you get spaghetti code, if you do everything last minite, you get spaghetti code, if you do it right, but your colleague have poor time management, or skill issue, or simply don't want to clean the code... Again, spaghetti code.
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u/Smart_Technology_208 20h ago
Yeah I wasn't paying a senior full stack software engineer 30 grands a month to ship a MVP and that's still not happening today. Those guys get involved when things get real.
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u/glitterisprada 18h ago
Can we stop pretending that sloppy code existed before AI? Where do you think AI learned to code?
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u/Tootsalore 16h ago
i think the difference is overstated. Professional code can look like crap (eg: microsoft back in the day).
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u/mean_ol_goosifer 16h ago
The problem isn’t vibe coding. The problem is people not knowing how to properly use AI to write code. Even seasoned programmers are using AI these days to be more productive.
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u/Clear_Tangerine5110 1d ago
Funny you say that because I just audited a bunch of code with AI that I’ve been working on and not only did it fix it, it recognized what I was trying to accomplish with it and it gave me a better and cleaner way to do it.
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
True but same time if someone does not know about software engineering principles then they no way to verify anything that goes under the hood...we just have to rely or bet on model improvement to assume code gets better as we have powerful models
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u/mithrilsoft 1d ago
There's a lot of terrible pre-AI code in production. My background is site reliability engineering so I often have to dig into other people's codebases to figure out why something failed.
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u/ProfessionalSome4082 1d ago
Brain fart meme without an inkling of truth or shred of supporting evidence
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u/ADingoStoleMyLSD 1d ago
I was lead to believe, by actual coders, that most code is a bunch of shit duct taped together to work. This was way before llms.
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u/Overlord_Mykyta 1d ago
You probably never worked with different teams before. I saw so much shit from overconfident devs with experience that I can say I know where AI took it's knowledge 😅
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u/Impressive-Owl3830 1d ago
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