You'll make more money than ever cleaning up AI generated messes.
And its actually not well paid because client now has the expectation that mostly everything is now done, you have to just only fix few things and you even have AI at your disposal so expect that you just write a better magic prompt.
I think actually often its faster and cheaper to start from scratch or at least rewrite whole module (of course still with AI with just better vibe engineering rather than vibe coding).
It's similar with house renovation - often its just cheaper and faster to tear whole building down rather than fixing it.
I'm just very curious where we are at the moment with in this profession.
However it was just adding pile of feature after features without taking time to refactor it. Client most likely did some few different attempts to add some specific feature or fixing something and there was a lot of dead code that haven't been used. This dead code actually confused AI and often tried to modify part of code that have been abandoned.
There was completely no tests. No performance tests. And some part of my job was to improve performance (cv/ai model inference) and robustness (crashes, memory leaks).
I think AI is fine and useful but whats bad with such vibe coded project if somebody hand over to you is you have completely no clue what part of the code are written/designed properly with good foundation if previous developer didn't test extensively and didn't refactor continuously. Even worse if you cannot talk to previous developer responsible for the project.
Second, do you actually want to do that work? I don’t. I spent years working as a freelancer and I cleaned up a lot of shitty code from other freelancers. Not really what I want to spend my 50s doing.
AI supported coding is like four wheel drive: it will get you stuck but in harder places. The people that use these tools to reach above the level of their actual understanding are creating some very expensive problems. If you're an expert level coder and you use AI to speed up the drudgework you can get good mileage out of them, but if you're a junior pretending to be a senior you're about to cost your employer a lot of $ hiring an actual senior.
And for good reason - the ill disciplined human body optimises for short term benefits. The disciplined body recognises the flaw in this and thinks much broader.