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Comment by kevin42 | Hacker News Reader

You'll have to take my word for it because I'm not going to disclose my private business or personal financial records.

But, I'm running a small, two person business and we are being paid by a large company to develop a robotics project. We're working at a very fast velocity and have fielded a prototype within a few months. I've been doing this kind of work for years, and we're more productive than larger teams (8-10 developers) I've employed before. Five years ago, I would have needed at least 4 senior engineers to do the work we're doing now, and we're moving faster than we could even then.

And I'm being compensated at a flat rate by a major company so we're making really good money. The customer is happy with the results. Claude easily writes 90% of the code we use.

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There's other word for such code and it sounds similar. It's crappy. I was tempted to use Claude couple of days ago to help me with optimization and from 4Gb RAM and 21s it managed to squeeze 1Tb and 41s. When I asked to fixed it AI reduced it to 1Gb and 10s. It just removed most heavy business logic. So yeah. 3 days and this was only total waste of time and cash

How do you know it’s crappy? Have you read the code?

Your comment is strange, he clearly did in this context - that's why he knew what went wrong?

Fwiw, I currently consider code generated by models below opus level borderline unusable. It really is horrendous there.

With opus, it's still not good - but it's a lot better then some of my colleagues write.

Well written code, carefully planned out and thought through is still only possible by either hand writing or holding the hand of the model so much that you may as well just write by have, as you'll be quicker.

However, the code opus produces is good enough... So I rarely take action anymore in private projects

In which world throwing business logic to "optimize memory usage" isn't crappy solution? Or making 1T from 4G? It didn't returned decent solution, contrary it was worst than terrible

Guess who will be held responsible when your vibe-coded robot maims or kills someone.

I have enough experience writing code by hand and designing complex systems with a team working for me. In a sense, this is no different. When I had a half-dozen mid to senior level developers, I did not verify every line of code they wrote. I did not have any expectation that they would write perfect code, and they didn't.

But as the owner of the company, I was still liable for the product my employees made. That is the same thing here. It's not negligent to have Claude code write code for you at 10x the speed you can do it yourself. If I hadn't supervised my employees and put practices in place to control quality and safety, I would be liable. I'm actually far less worried about liability now, because I have my hands in every part of the system.

Calling it vibe coding is pejorative at this point, meant to imply that someone who has no skill or craft in software development just types a few prompts and gets something they didn't have a hand in the design or development. That's not what the professionals who are using AI coding are doing.

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