I don't think it will be; a vibe coder using Gas Town will easily spit out 300k LoC for a MVP TODO application. Can you imagine what it will spit out for anything non-trivial?
How do you even begin to approach remedying that? The only recourse for humans is to offer to rebuild it all using the existing features as a functional spec.
There are cases where that will be the appropriate decision. That may not be every case, but it'll be enough cases that there's money to be made.
There will be other cases where just untangling the clusterfuck and coming up with any sense of direction at all, to be implemented however, will be the key deliverable.
I have had several projects that look like this already in the VoIP world, and it's been very gainful. However, my industry probably does not compare fairly to the common denominator of CRUD apps in common tech stacks; some of it is specialised enough that the LLMs drop to GPT-2 type levels of utility (and hallucination! -- that's been particularly lucrative).
Anyway, the problem to be solved in vibe coding remediation often has little to do with the code itself, which we can all agree can be generated in essentially infinite amounts at a pace that is, for all intents and purposes, almost instantaneous. If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.
The general business problem to be solved is how to make this consumable to the business as a whole, which still moves at the speed of human. I am fond of a metaphor I heard somewhere: you can't just plug a firehose into your house's plumbing and expect a fire hydrant's worth of water pressure out of your kitchen faucet.
In the same way, removing the barriers to writing 300,000 lines isn't the same as removing the barriers to operationalising, adopting and owning 300,000 lines in a way that can be a realistic input into a real-world product or service. I'm not talking about the really airy-fairy appeals to maintainability or reliability one sometimes hears (although, those are very real concerns), but rather, how to get one's arms around the 300,000 lines from a product direction perspective, except by prompting one's way into even more slop.
I think that's where the challenges will be, and if you understand that challenge, especially in industry- and domain-specific ways (always critical for moats), I think there's a brisk livelihood to be made here in the foreseeable future. I make a living from adding deep specialist knowledge to projects executed by people who have no idea what they're doing, and LLMs haven't materially altered that reality in any way. Giving people who have no idea what they're doing a way to express that cluelessness in tremendous amounts of code, quickly, doesn't really solve the problem, although it certainly alters the texture of the problem.
Lastly, it's probably not a great time to be a very middling pure CRUD web app developer. However, has it ever been, outside of SV and certain very select, fortunate corners of the economy? The lack of moat around it was a problem long before LLMs. I, for example, can't imagine making a comfortable living in it outside of SV engineer inflation; it just doesn't pay remotely enough in most other places. Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating. Underappreciated specialist personalities will certainly see a return in a flight-to-quality environment.
Businesses don't pay for CRUD apps, businesses pay for apps that solve problems which often involves CRUD to persist their valuable data. This is often within the sometimes very strange and difficult to understand business logic which varies greatly from one business to another. That is what "CRUD app developers" actually do, so dismissing them as though there is zero business logic and only CRUD is doing them, us, a disservice.
Why, I do plenty of what you describe myself...
Like 80% of jobs outside the USA are either local or outsourced CRUD web applications. Many people live quite well thanks to exchange rates. I wonder what's gonna happen if/when those jobs disappear.
> If you are in need vibe coding disaster remediation consulting, it's not because you need to refactor 300,000 lines of slop real quick. That's not going to happen.
My experience as a consultant to business is that they only ever bring in consultants when they need a fix and are in a hurry. No client of mine ever phoned me up to say "Hey, there, have you any timeslots next week to advise on the best way to do $FOO?", it's always "Hey there, we need to get out an urgent fix to this crashing/broken system/process - can we chat during your next free slot?".
> Like everything else worth doing, deep specialisation is valuable and, to some extent, insulating.
I dunno about this - depends on the specialisation.
They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.
Someone with deep knowledge of the insurance industry? Nope - they'll look for a f/timer. Someone with deep knowledge of payment processing? No consultant, they'll get a f/timer.
No, that's fair, and I think you're right about that. But refactoring 300,000 lines 'real quick' isn't going to happen, regardless of that. :)
> They want a deep specialist in K8? Sure, they'll hire a consultant. Someone very specialist in React? They'll hire a consultant. C++ experts? Consultants again.
I implicitly had narrow technical specialisations in mind, albeit including ones that intersect with things like "insurance industry workflows".
That's my worry. Might be put off a few years, but still...
For what I am vibing my normal work process is: build a feature until it works, have decent test coverage, then ask Claude to offer a code critique and propose refactoring ideas. I'd review them and decide which to implement. It is token-heavy but produces good, elegant codebases at scales I am working on for my side projects. I do this for every feature that is completed, and have it maintain design docs that document the software architecture choices made so far. It largely ignores them when vibing very interactively on a new feature, but it does help with the regular refactoring.
In my experience, it doubles the token costs per feature but otherwise it works fine.
I have been programming since I was 7 - 40 years ago. Across all tech stacks, from barebones assembly through enterprise architecture for a large enterprise. I thought I was a decent good coder, programmer and architect. Now, I find the code Claude/Opus 4.5 generates for me to be in general of higher quality then anything I ever made myself.
Mainly because it does things I'd be too tired to do, or never bother because why expand energy on refactoring for something that is perfectly working and not to be further developed.
Btw, its a good teaching tool. Load a codebase or build one, and then have it describe the current software architecture, propose changes and explain their impact and so on.
I have about the same experience as you do and experience using Opus 4.5.
If this is true, you weren’t a very good programmer. There’s much more to code quality than refactoring working code.
Yup, my conclusion exactly.
With that said, most code I have seen in private sector is almost objectively horrible (and certainly subjectively). Code manufactured with the current best tools such as Claude compares favourably. Companies rarely have the patience to pay for well manicured, elegant code. If it sort of works it ships.
A good engineer will tell you how to spend 25% of effort to get to 90% of the result you want. With maintainable code, and importantly with less code that touches fewer systems.
A bad engineer will deliver exactly what product asked for without asking questions, generate 4x the code, and touch every piece of the system.
Companies are just setup in a way that incentivizes building organizations that create bad code. Most places would rather hire 100 bad engineers who can be easily replaced than 5 good engineers.
Despite having worked with or managed hundreds of developers over the years, I don't think there were more than, maybe, 5 that I would not gladly swap for a claude-equivalent. Diligent, able to produce good code when adequately supervised, and devoid of a desire for work life balance :-)
Most software devs are just mediocre, they learn to code late in life, they work 9-5, and often stop learning as quickly as they can.
This is quite true, and it is this -- really, a special case of "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent" -- that has me worried about the implications for the labour economy more than anything else.
This is a possibility in very well-trodden areas of tech, where the stack and the application are both banal to the point of being infinitely well-represented in the training.
As far as anything with any kind of moat whatsoever? Here, I'm not too concerned.
The way the do, which is? I've skimmed comments and a lot of them is hate, hostility towards OP's project and coders "without skill" in general, also denial because there's no way anything vibe-coded worked. At best, there is strong tribalism on both ends.
You might see more opposing views in this thread, but if you browse this site often you'll see both sides.
Those embracing it heavily do not see the nuances carefully creating maintainable solutions, planning and recognizing tech debt, and where it's acceptable short term. They are also missing the theory building behind what is being created. Sure AI models might get even better and could solve everything. But I think it's naive to think that will be generally good for 90% of the population including people not in tech.
Using these models (text or image) devalues the work of everyone in more than one way. It is harmful for creative work and human expression.
This tech, and a lot of tech, especially ones built by large corporations for profit extraction and human exploitation, is very unlikely to improve the lives at a population level long term. It can be said for a lot of tech (ie. social media = powerful propaganda). The goal of the people creating these models are to not need humans for their work. At which point I don't know what would happen, kill the peasants?
I agree what we do requires a lot of creative thinking. When AI supporters attempt to use an argument comparing to factory workers being freed from dull laborious work by robots, the analogy falls flat on two fronts. First, there's nothing creative about that sort of work and second, because robots are highly accurate; while AI can often be just high.
Also we are still designing systems and have to be able to define the problem properly, at least in my company when we look at the velocity in delivering projects it is barely up since AI because the bottlenecks are elsewhere..
Do you truly believe it won't get better, maybe even better at whole system design and implementation than people?
What are you calling "growth"? Adoption, or LLM progress? LLM progress has objectively slowed down, and for rather obvious reasons. The leaps from GPT-2 to GPT-4 can't be reprised forever.
Literally yesterday I remarked to my tech friends how fun coding with CoPilot is. I actually make forward progress now, and I understand all that the agent is doing.
For me, coding is an enjoyable means to an end. I do enjoy the process, but I enjoy the results more.
You're right though about it not choosing some different path, I might or I might not know that.
They've even got their own slogan: "you're probably just not prompting it properly"
That's the same energy as telling other professions to "just learn to code, bro" once they are displaced by AI.
But I guess it doesn't feel nice once the shoe is on the other foot, though. If nobody values the quality of human art, why should anybody value the quality of human code?
It's the exact same neoliberal elites who told everyone to code one year and told them they'd all be automated of a job the next year.
I dunno who exactly you think you're being condescending towards.