I experimented with vibe coding a text game, just to see what would happen. The service I used vibe coded the initial screen and conditions of a text game with hundreds of lines and a javascript-based 3D engine. It met the initial specification posed by my prompt, but I immediately knew that if I continued "vibing" ("vibrating?") I was only going to drown in this unmaintainable mountain of spaghetti. That this is true of many if not all vibe-coded things has become an emergent problem for the professional-managerial sorts in charge. Enter the human engineers who must now deal with brownfield repositories full of hazardous vibe.
"I've been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023. Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year," Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to "review, fix your vibe code" on Fiverr, told me in an email. "I started fixing vibe-coded projects because I noticed a growing number of developers and small teams struggling to refine AI-generated code that was functional but lacked the polish or 'vibe' needed to align with their vision. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap, combining my coding expertise with an eye for aesthetic and user experience."
If this blogging malarkey doesn't work out, a career of least resistance is probably rescue dog on vibe mountain. Consider how similar the below list of vibe troubles is to "I paid a kid to do my company website and now I need a professional to fix it," a reliable source of work for journeyfolk web devs since the 1990s.
Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive. He said he also often refines color schemes, animations, and layouts to better match the creator's intended aesthetic.
Previously:
• California's undersea dumpsites are warping ocean life
• Somali pirates versus European toxic-waste dumpers
• Toxic waste gets birds laid
