Comment by grayhatter

> Really for those of us who actually work in critical systems (emergency services in my case) - of course we're not going to start patching the core applications with vibe code.

I used to believe that no one would seriously consider this too... but I don't believe that this is a safe assumption anymore. You might be the exception, but there are many more people who don't consider the implications of turning over said intellectual control.

> But yeah, that frankenstein reporting script that half a dozen amateur hackers made a mess of over 20 years instead of refactoring and redesigning? That's prime fodder for this stuff. NOBODY wants to clean that stuff up by hand.

It's horrible, no one currently understands it, so let the AI do it, so that still, no one will understand it, but at least this one bug will be harder to trigger.

I don't agree that harder to trigger bugs are better than easy to trigger bugs. And from my view, the argument that "it's currently broken now, and hard to fix!" Isn't exactly an argument I find compelling for leaving it that way.

> I used to believe that no one would seriously consider this too... but I don't believe that this is a safe assumption anymore. You might be the exception, but there are many more people who don't consider the implications of turning over said intellectual control.

Then they'll pay for it when something goes wrong with their systems with their job etc. You need a different mindset in this particular segment industry - %99.999 uptime is everything (we actually have a %100 uptime for the past 6 years on our platform - chasing that last 0.001 is hard, and something will _eventually_ hit us).

> It's horrible, no one currently understands it, so let the AI do it, so that still, no one will understand it, but at least this one bug will be harder to trigger.

I think you're commenting without context. It's a particular nasty Perl script that's been duct taped to shell scripts and bolted hard on to a Proprietary Third Party application which needs to go - having Claude/GPT rewrite that in a modern language, spending some time on it to have it design proper interfaces and API's around where the script needs to interface other things when nobody wants to touch the code would be the greatest thing that can happen to it.

You still have the old code to test, so have the agent run exhaustive testing on its implementation to prove that its robust, or more so than the original. It's not rocket surgery.