As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I’ve been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It’s a mess. But like I said I’ve been at it for awhile and I’ve seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn’t learn anything. It’s literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it’s AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I’ve been getting so many requests for gigs I’ve been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I’ve burned through all my contacts that now I’m just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it’s that bad (well bad for companies, it’s fantastic for developers.)
EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I’ve marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I’ll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I’ve already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I’ll shoot you an email or DM.
That’s what happens when you have Intel inside ;o)
(Yes, yes, I know, it’s the whole binary based floating point thing, not just Intel, although my Atari 800 BASIC interpreter implemented floating point in BCD, so it didn’t have that issue.)
Retired dev here, I’m curious about the nature of “the mess”. Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like “vibe coding”. If you’re using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don’t see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.
essentially, from what I’ve been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it’s not even vibe coding, it’s “here’s a prompt, build it, i’m pushing it to production” coding.
An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively.
I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.
I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.
TBH that sounds like a lot of code I’ve seen from outsourcing companies in India. Their typical approach is to copy an existing program, module, web page or whatever and modify it as quickly as possible to turn it into what’s needed. The result is often a mishmash of irrelevant code, giant data queries that happen to retrieve some field that’s needed along with a ton of unnecessary crap, mixing frameworks, etc.
They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they’ll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.
I imagine you aren’t talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn’t make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it’s been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.
As someone who has been a consultant/freelance dev for over 20 years now this is true. Lately I’ve been getting offers and contacts from places to essentially clean up the mess from LLMs/AI.
A lot of is pretty bad. It’s a mess. But like I said I’ve been at it for awhile and I’ve seen this before when companies were offshoring anything and everything to India and surprise, surprise, they didn’t learn anything. It’s literally the exact same thing. Instead of an Indian guy that claims they know everything and will work for peanuts, it’s AI pretty much stating the same shit.
I’ve been getting so many requests for gigs I’ve been hitting up random out of work devs on linkedin in my city and referring the jobs to them. I’ve burned through all my contacts that now I’m just reaching out to absolute strangers to get them work.
yes it’s that bad (well bad for companies, it’s fantastic for developers.)
EDIT: Since my comment has gained a lot of traction I’ve marked down peoples user names and portfolios/emails to my dev list. If something more comes up (and trust me, it will) I’ll shoot you an email or msg on here. Currently I’ve already shoved off a bunch of stuff to others and have nothing as of now but I imagine that will change by next week so if more stuff comes up I’ll shoot you an email or DM.
How much is the pay for those gigs?
We’ve hired a bunch of Indian guys who are using AI to do their work… the results are marginally better than either approach independently.
a negative times a negative is a positive?
More like 0.10 + 0.05 = 0.20, in this case.
To be fair, 0.2 + 0.1 = 0.30000000000000004
That’s what happens when you have Intel inside ;o)
(Yes, yes, I know, it’s the whole binary based floating point thing, not just Intel, although my Atari 800 BASIC interpreter implemented floating point in BCD, so it didn’t have that issue.)
Retired dev here, I’m curious about the nature of “the mess”. Is it buggy AI-generated code that got into production? I know an active dev who uses ChatGTP every day, says it saves him a hell of a lot of work. What he does sounds like “vibe coding”. If you’re using AI for grunt work and keep a human is in the workflow to verify the code, I don’t see how it would differ from junior devs working under a senior. Have some companies been using poorly managed all-AI tools or what? Sorry for the long question.
essentially, from what I’ve been dealing with, most if it is their offshore people using the AI to completely do the job from start to finish and no one is verifying anything. So it’s not even vibe coding, it’s “here’s a prompt, build it, i’m pushing it to production” coding.
An example from work a few weeks ago. I fixed some vibe coded UI code that had made it to prod. The layout of the UI was basically just meant to be an easy overview of information relevant to an item. The LLM had done everything right except it assumed a weird mix of tailwind and bootstrap, mixing and matching css classes from both. After I implemented the classes myself it went from a single column view to grids and nested grids grouping the data intuitively. I talked with the dev who implemented it, and basically it was just something quickly cobbled together with AI until it was passable. The AI had added a lot of extra that served no function and that didn’t conform to a single css framework, but looked like it could. For months noone questioned it despite talk about that part of the UI needing a facelift.
I don’t know how representative it is, but about half the time I’m thoroughly confused about a piece of code and why it was written the way it was, the answer has turned out to be AI. And unlike when a developer wrote it, there rarely is any reason to have written it the weird way.
TBH that sounds like a lot of code I’ve seen from outsourcing companies in India. Their typical approach is to copy an existing program, module, web page or whatever and modify it as quickly as possible to turn it into what’s needed. The result is often a mishmash of irrelevant code, giant data queries that happen to retrieve some field that’s needed along with a ton of unnecessary crap, mixing frameworks, etc.
Think of AI as a hard working, arrogant, knowledgeable, unimaginative junior intern.
The vibe coding is great for small, self contained tasks. It doesn’t scale to a codebase (yet?).
They learned that by the time all of their shitty decisions ruin everything, they’ll be able to bail with their golden parachute while everyone else has to deal with the fallout.
I imagine you aren’t talking about large companies that just let ai loose in their code base. Are these like companies that fired half their staff and realized llms couldn’t make up for the difference, or small companies that tried to make new apps without a proper team and came up short?
primarily medium to large companies. the smaller startups seem to know better. the former laid off a bunch of staff and in most cases offshored the work to people who ONLY use AI to build things. A few rare cases it’s been a Project Manager who paid for a Claude.ai subscription and had it build things from start to finish then push to production. If I see something that has a gradient background I know they had Claude build it.
Sounds like you need to start a company and per diem staff.
Send them my way! I’m freelance currently and good at cleaning up that kind of stuff
Would you happen to be willing to throw work to random out-of-work devs who aren’t in your city? I may know a couple over here in England…
Throw us some work if you like, although I already work as software engineer but wouldn’t turn down a side gig cleaning up after LLMs.
Sometimes it is a bunch of Indian guys pretending to be AI!