I got the first prototype version of the code for the project I’m currently working on. It is an Arduino Sketch, that contains 1k lines, stores every single Value needed as a global Variable and every function reads and writes to these global variables, instead of taking them in as parameters. This code is so bad, that I refuse to even look at it. The effort to take the existing codebase and transform it into something useable is as high as rewriting it from scratch.
When telling my colleague that his code is absolute garbage, he just told me “its not my code, Claude did it”. I am constantly pushing towards implementing the project in a proper way, but it has been nothing but fights against people who don’t know how to code and who refuse to acknowledge that ignoring any standards of maintainable code does not turn out in the end and it makes sense to rewrite the project sooner than later.
You tell it what the program does, it gives you a draft update each iteration you test it and tell the machine what went wrong, it’ll apologise too much and spit out the next iteration, repeat until successful
One project I vibe coded took four iterations before it compiled, I would have had more luck if I used a model optimised for code
That exactly is the reason why I usually don’t use any AI Tools, because in most (at least for me) cases its faster to just do it by hand.
More fun to write it yourself, but the give specification, get draft, give faults, get draft cycle is pretty fast after you have your initial spec ready (in your case the working code). Maybe a minute or two?