We charge $10k a week to delete AI-generated code

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• Hacker News
• > One week. Three senior engineers. $10,000. We commit to a reduction target up front, and you pay in proportion to how much of it we hit.

  Commitment ain't what it used to be.

  by argee
• 15 years ago it was always fix price for undefined amount of work, 10 years ago it was agile where client was promissed something but paid per day.

  I prefer the old way of doing things: do the offer for free, commit to a task, and accept, that it might not be a success after all. I'd just loose a week of work, but probably learn a lot.

  by zie1ony
• "Two weeks of warranty" jumped out at me. That's like "you have two weeks to find the thing we broke, or else we aren't responsible for it." In my experience, a good bug can hide for months more than two weeks! My codebases are definitely not in the target demographic for this service, though, and maybe if I were in the target group (bunch of LLM slop, trying to dig out of the hole, presumably no shipping product or existing userbase yet) the proposition would appeal to me.
  by quuxplusone
• This is a fair point. But these days bugs are not so scary anymore, so a client can vibecode a fix faster then getting me to fix it. Of course if Opus can't figure it out, I would always try to help. I have never left a client alone, warranty or not. This is just how I was raised.
  by zie1ony
• If the client has an extensive suite of automated tests assessing if the software is meeting its requirements, it should be possible for them to flush out most regressions within minutes or hours, not weeks.

  If the client hasn't invested in setting that up, the resulting situation is the clients' responsibility.

  by shoo
• "rm -rf ./" can't be that expensive, right?
  by kiernanmcgowan
• I charge $15k a week to fix any AI code that they fix that then needs to be fixed.
  by scritty-dev
• I charge $100k to tell them they never needed the code and delete it all.
  by hahahaa
• I am currently working with a non-dev startup CEO that's fully embraced Claude Code and vibe coding.

  90% of my work is to run code review workflows and steer his CLAUDE.md into the correct architecture choices and away from past mistakes.

  So far it's working pretty well -- I'm able to unslopify the code and maintain the agent's performance. And the CEO is happy, he's able to develop his product pretty fast and not hit any walls.

  by i_have_an_idea
• > One week. Three senior engineers. $10,000.

  What your markup on their salaries? For the level of work you're promising, it sounds like they may be at market or below.

  by bdcravens
• Probably will do a patio11 and keep raising as they get more confident to do so.
  by hahahaa
• Being honest, knocking one refactor after another is super intense and we would burn out quickly. To me refactoring/reading/reviewing a code that you have never seen is one of the hardest thing to do for a software developer. If I have 4 such projects a month, I'd just hire more people and allow them to rest. Also invest more into internal tooling to speed things up would be good solution to remove some burden. I think $10,000 for refactor is a fair price.

  We also have other gigs and ongoing project, where we can rest a bit.

  by zie1ony
• This seems like a easy way to get into consulting. Once you deliver the code back to the owners they are going to do the vibe coding again on the top whatever refactored code you get back. In other words it can become a perpetual cycle.
  by sandeepkd
• Some (lots of) people will trade a lot of money for general life freedom. If it's well-booked, a service like this can come to around 105k/year for each dev.

  A salary like this is only a big compromise if you live in a very high cost of life area.

  by Lalabadie
• They're all based in Poland, so it's probably fairly generous compared to European market.
  by kristianc
• lol looks like they are using a similar methodology to how we use Claude in house.

  Honestly, the code we write with AI is cleaner, better documented, better factored, more maintainable, and less bugs than back in old days before code assistant agents. I think people must be just yoloing it, because it seems a lot like a holding it wrong type problem.

  Documentation driven development is your friend.

  by K0balt
• Yeah, that's how I've been using it.

  Problem is that you can't do a FOMO-fueled hype IPO that gets a trillion dollars if your argument is "this is a tool that can improve the quality of work your employees output".

  It needs to be a "we are building a doomsday weapon here, give me money" argument. Even if it is false. Especially if it is false.

  by surgical_fire
• Same here. Honestly, there's also a bunch of human friction that goes away. I can tell a junior that a change needs to be significantly refactored (or even thrown away entirely) without the psychological damage of discarding days/weeks of work from them.

  Previously, I would need to do the trade-off calculation. How urgently does this need to ship, and do we have time to rework this? What are the deal breakers that need to be addressed, versus what things are best practice/ideal for maintainability? How did their last code review go and do they need a small win right now?

  There's no more "nit" comments tagged as nits: just things to fix. It's de-personalized in the sense that we can both at least pretend/have plausible deniability and blame the model for being dumb, as opposed to the person making mistakes. I flat out told someone that a PR was not solving the right problem earlier, and neither of us thought it was a big deal. I could give the technical guidance and suggest a path forward to "help Claude understand better".

  by supern0va
• with AI, documentation driven development is an understatement, if you take the time not just to document but to also provide lots of examples and potentially even data structures for the implementation (including intermediary data structures if you know them) the output is better than anything you would make in reasonable time.
  by teravor
• My barber once told me, "You don't pay me for what I cut, you pay me for what I leave behind". Now I'm bald.
  by swader999
• Left behind nothing!
  by sudo_cowsay
• > Now I'm bald.

  You always have to remember to tell the barber "No mistakes", just like you have to tell Claude.

  by georgemcbay
• “We use Claude Code too”

  I understand that it’s probably impossible to sell non-AI-assisted solutions to AI-pilled companies (even when their headaches are AI-induced), but my gut reaction to “take an AI-inflated codebase and apply AI deflation to it” is something like “that’s akin to applying two rounds of lossy transcoding; the errors don’t cancel out, they cross-multiply”.

  by fwlr
• Not exactly. It’s more a kin to giving an electric drill to a tradesman vs a screw driver. The tradesman will use the electric drill effectively.
  by sunnybeetroot
• The level of "slop" produced by AI is a direct function of skill of the developer and broadness of the prompts.

  Broad prompts by unskilled users results in a complete mess. Targeted prompts by a skilled person reviewing the code produces something better.

  Quality of application varies widely, and generally agree with the categories mentioned by the sibling post.

  by adam_arthur
• the claude giveth and the claude taketh away. I could definitely use claude in a tightly directed manner to clean up a slopified codebase (and I would enjoy doing so), you just need to think of it as closer to a power tool than an agent.
  by zem
• Ngl I’m doing this right now for a client. Part of my strategy is to write out e2e tests that get a certain baseline of functionality, and then use that as the check for any change that I make to the codebase to make sure it continues to work.

  So workflow for a full web app is make e2e tests for all use cases. Then add a very strict duplication checker, and linter, and then just tell the ai to hit a certain duplication limit like 3%, check the linter, and add unit tests to ~95% or greater of the code.

  With the right CI and other checks that are deterministic you can really do a lot with a codebase.

  by khasan222
• I’ve reviewed and worked on a lot of vibe coded apps (I’m an engineer, 20 YOE).

  I can basically split it into 3 groups.

  1) Pure vibe code. No software experience.

  2) AI with someone who knows the software development process and some things about software, but can’t code.

  3) Engineers using AI assistance, reading/reviewing code, forcing structure.

  If someone can pay to replace #1 with #3 it’s very worth it. The quality between each of these tiers is enormous.

  I actually got curious and asked AI to look at each module in a codebase, and tell me about who wrote it without looking at git.

  It successfully profiled all 3 of these groups and correctly attached them to the right module.

  by xmcp123
• NGL I'd argue there's a certain appeal to "use AI to prototype a feature as fast as possible and focus your engineer hours on building a comprehensive testing and fuzzing plan" followed by a "remove and review everything that can be cut without breaking the tests" cleanup pass.
  by OneDeuxTriSeiGo
• I guess it was only a matter of time before this niche of business developed.

  AI is an imprecise "programming" language, full of ambiguity (English) trying to produce precise relationships between different concepts.

  It certainly works great on small scale, building block type of things, but the more a project grows in complexity, components, interfacing with other heterogenous systems in other languages or APIs, understanding wtf is going on top to bottom.... it fails miserably.

  Reminds me of how xUML was going to be the panacea to replace coding. AI is failing for the same reasons. At least with xUML you have a precise definition - with AI, you're vibing your way into one.

  by martin1975