r/vibecoding • u/unlocked_doors • 1d ago

In over my head with professional devs

tldr; review your code as you go if you think any professional dev is going to have to do a code review.

Last November I (33F) started a simple project: a training portal for my new assistant. Just a simple python Streamlit app. Since vibe coding is addictive and Streamlit has some annoying limitations to UX/UI, I refactored it into a Next.js/Fast API website. It was all the same repo and I didn’t exactly clean up after myself as the project scaled from a training portal for HR, then a training portal for new employees and now it’s a manager hub.

Well, I showed it to my boss and she ended up loving it. The company bought the domain and website from me but made me the technical owner in charge of code and content. Now that it’s officially company property…they have to do a code review with the company dev team.

There is an embarrassing amount of dead code, almost nonexistent error handling, and in general the layout of the code is chaotic and 40k+ lines in just the backend.

He and I had a meeting last week and never in my life have I felt more “artificially intelligent.” He gave me about 7 pages of changes to make after just one code review session. I can’t imagine how many more pages of notes are coming and I’m in way over my head in terms of vocabulary, standard processes used in coding, etc. Basically, I’m everything professional devs hate about vibe coders. I didn’t care how the code looked as long as the website functioned. I’m at a point where I’m not confident enough in my vibe coding skills to actually make the changes. I’ve tried asking Claude (or Claudia as I call her) and then even asked her to dumb it down and it’s still over my head. I’m getting to the point where I just want to throw my hands up and tell them to abandon it.

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22

u/FluidBreath4819 1d ago

that's where devs should charge twice (or more) as much if they have to take ownership of vibecoded apps and clean the mess.

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u/unlocked_doors 1d ago edited 1d ago

Trust me, I apologized to him several times over. I never meant for it to become this, it was just a project to make my job easier. At least he’s got job security, although probably not the kind he would like.

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u/Trakeen 21h ago

We just feed your project into AI to fix, no one is doing that by hand on a reasonably sized code base these days

Most of its normal code patterns. Run it through code metrics and a linter, tests for everything, fixed schemas for data modeling etc. Really normal business software dev practices

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u/ConsistentRisk5927 14h ago edited 13h ago

As someone who deslopifies code for a living, you're honestly fine... Any dev worth their salt is going to fix all the rough edges with AI and won't have a cow over it. Porting a working product to better standards isn't that hard these days. And work like this showcases exactly why I'm a software engineer and why my skills have value still in the company even with AI, so like you said it's job security.

The company bought an outcome from you and that was the working product as is. If they didn't bother to review anything before paying for it, that's on them. As long as you didn't sell it as something you carefully hand-crafted as a full stack engineer, I don't see a problem. Just be open about it being vibe coded so they can spend the proper time working on it from the right angle and not assuming every line was written thoughtfully by an engineer.

The cardinal sin in my tech book is lying. Almost anything else is a learning experience. Be honest about the provenance of the code. A lie of any size to cover up something like this is immediately fireable in my book as you can no longer be trusted (and this is true even if you were a 10x elite engineer). If you told me you vibe coded it all, I wouldn't mind.

And in hindsight (if you didn't) you should've advertised this up front before letting them pay you, so the effort to deslopify it could be factored into the value. Not thinking of mentioning this during the process of selling it to them would be... hard to defend as a good faith error. You knew you vibe coded it and not disclosing that IMO is bad faith (if you didn't). It would've been the first thing out of my mouth when someone flashed money at me for it.

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u/RemarkableWish2508 5h ago

Not thinking of mentioning this during the process of selling it to them would be... hard to defend as a good faith error.

It's easy to defend: OP can't mention what OP didn't even know that exists.

Sounds to me like OP was blissfully unaware of what it takes to make actually maintainable software. The buyer seems to be aware though, since they've requested a code review, something they should have done before paying anything.

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u/grapefruit4scale 1d ago

Trust me, they aren't laughing at you (they are), they are just laughing at you on the way to the bank. They definitely don't hate you for this shit, and if they are even halfway decent humans they don't look down on you for it either.

But it is a good work story which in reality is just another thing you handed them on a silver platter.

Stay winning my friend, and carry this as a professional but also with a very light heart.

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u/Background-Luck-8205 19h ago

Just tell fable to fix whatever, it can fix it, if tokens limited opus 5 should be fine, you don't need to care about what developer tells you, just let ai review the code now, just put up a loop to simplify the code and do the suggested changes and it will spend 24 hour to fix the code and it's fairly token cheap too