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Comment by stevage

6 days ago

One of my current clients vibe coded an app then hired me to assess it, and ultimately rewrite it.

I'm really curious whether that will become a trend.

A dozen years ago a company hired me to maintain an ecommerce system that had been built for them by a guy that left soon after. They told me "he is not even a developer." That was my assessment too. The system mostly worked but it didn't run fast enough to process their daily load. It was a mess but it would cost too much to rewrite. I managed to fix the worst parts, then switched to other customers. No idea if they found somebody else to keep fixing stuff.

They kind of vibe coded that app well before vibe coding had been a thing.

  • I guess when you put it like that there is a long history of production systems being built by people who had no business doing it. An access database running a whole company etc.

    • A friend of mine was doing modelling (as in, being a model) in a large European city. He then worked as a product manager for a well-known luxury company. He ended up writing a system in visual basic that was responsible for a large amount of internal plumbing. He had no experience in programming.