> I've been playing with SEO for this website, and I learned that Google prefers human content because (they are not gonna say it) it needs to train, it cannot train on what it has already trained on. Google's crawler is hungry for human content
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
I'm repeating this 3rd time, but, a non-technical client of mine has whipped up an impressive SaaS prototype with tons of features. They still need help with the cleanup, it's all slop, but I was doing many small coding requests for that client. Those gigs will simply disappear.
I just got started using Claude very recently. I have not been in the loop how much better it got. Now it's obvious that no one will write code by hand. I genuinely fear for my ability to make a living as soon as 2 years from now, if not sooner. I figure the only way is to enter the red queen race and ship some good products. This is the positive I see. If I put 30h/week into something, I have productivity of 3 people. If it's a weekend project at 10h/week, I have now what used to be that full week of productivity. The economics of developing products solo have vastly changed for the better.
My non-technical client has totally vibe coded a SaaS prototype with lots of features, way bigger product than OP and it sort of works. They spent like 200 hours on it. I wonder what would have been the time needed to clean it up and approve it is secure. I declined to work on it, as I was not sure if it's even possible or if it would be better to rewrite the entire thing from scratch with better prompts. I was not that sure about it given the cost and the fact that they had a product that sort of worked and I let them go to find someone to clean it up. My reasoning is that if the client took 200h to develop this without stopping to check the code, it would take me 2 - 3 x to rewrite it with AI, but the right way, while the cleanup may be so painful it would be way better value for money to rewrite it from scratch.
> I declined to work on it, as I was not sure if it's even possible or if it would be better to rewrite the entire thing from scratch with better prompts.
This is a bit of an unknown right now. If you get a working prototype, but need to productionize it, make sure it can scale, and get it looked over with a security mineset, how long it might take isn't clear, so finding someone who will do that is hard.
It sounds like a really crappy deal to a contractor. In the eyes of the client, you are basically a janitor and Claude is like a superstar that built the whole thing, while the truth is reviewing such code is harder than reviewing and quality approving one's own work. I hope it proves out to be uneconomical and we will be just rewriting the vibe code from scratch.
A non-technical client of mine has built an entire app with a very large feature set with Opus. I declined to work on it to clean it up, I was afraid it would have been impossible and too much risk. I think we are at a level where it can build and auto-correct its mistakes, but the code is still slop and kind of dangerous to put in production. If you care about the most basic security.
I'm late to the party and I'm just getting started with Antrophic models. I have been finding Sonnet decent enough, but it seems to have trouble naming variables correctly (it's not just that most names are poor and undescriptive, sometimes it names it wrong, confusing) or sometimes unnecessarily declaring, re-declaring variables, encoding, decoding, rather than using the value that's already there etc. Is Opus better at this?
> Mostly I’m just there to press the big “I’m accountable” button on the screen
This is going to be way harder now vs. when we used to write the code ourselves. In contracting space, the problem now is that you may have a client that vibe coded an app and be very out of touch about the costs involved to have a developer approve it. It's going to be a hard sell, when the client builds the entire thing themselves and you are a mare peasant doing QA review.
I'm using it via Copilot, now considering to also try Open Code (with Copilot license). I don't know if it's as good as Claude Code, but it's pretty good. You get 100 Sonnet requests or 33 Opus request in the subscription per month ($20 business plan) + some less powerful models have no limits (i.e. GPT 4.1), while extra Sonnet request is $0.04 and Opus $0.12, so another $20 buys 250 Sonnet requests + 83 Opus requests. This works for me better since I do not code all day, every single day. Also a request is a request, so it does not matter if it's just a plain edit task or an agent request, it costs the same.
Btw. I trust Microsoft / GitHub to not train on my data more (with the Business license) than I would trust Antrophic.
This is the reason why you can hardly trust AI companies to not train on your code. If you care about privacy, I think it's best to use Antrophic models via a third-party provider like GitHub Copilot (business) or Amazon Bedrock.
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