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

zie1ony

Creator here, There is a new kind of task for software engineers these days. A client calls, asks for a "small refactor," and sends you 100k lines of AI-generated spaghetti. And this is great! This is something we can work with. Any experienced engineer can look at a codebase like that and quickly see what to refactor, where a library replaces a few thousand hand-rolled lines, and what smells bad. Removing the first 30% is easy. The next 30% is harder, and that is exactly what the price should be on: doing what others can't. We use coding agents too, of course, but as a tool, not as the driving force. That is why we started Slopfix, a software house focused entirely on refactoring AI-generated codebases. We commit to a reduction target up front, and the client pays in proportion to how much of it we hit. We get paid to delete code. I am sharing this because cleaning up after agents with 1M token context is a real business for engineers. Curious what HN thinks.

swader999

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.

Oras

I want it be positive, but it’s a bit hard with this one. Do you expect the client to sit down and explain every detail? If they know how to do that, they wouldn’t be having messy code base as the one the post is describing. And let’s say you’ve been hired, what happens after that? You think Claude.md file is sufficient to progress from that point? The problem is real, but the solution is a fantasy.

tensegrist

> Then we cut: the fourteen date formatters become one, something's off here

quuxplusone

"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.

nathansoz

100% supportive of this type of product but I also find the ai-slop text to be a bit ironic.

kiernanmcgowan

"rm -rf ./" can't be that expensive, right?

K0balt

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.

fwlr

“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”.

bdcravens

> 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.

bradgranath

$333/week doesn’t quite seem like enough to live on. How many of these are you planning to run concurrently?

simonw

> You have an AI-generated codebase that works, but adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things? Sounds like you forgot to have the agents use red/green TDD and build a robust test suite while they were shipping all of those features.

guluarte

I don't think one week is enough to learn the complex business rules that some software needs to follow.

martin1975

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.

thraway3837

We replaced a 120,000 USD/year low-code/no-code platform that was running a lot of workflows. And we have another platform that is also similar that we are on track to replace by EOY. Both have been replaced by "vibe" coding. It works well. Everyone's happy. People are having fun with it. We get feature requests, improvements, ideas, feedback. JIRA tickets get created, and we ask AI to reference that ticket, code to it, and create a PR. We have senior engineers review the actual functionality and none of them have read any more than a few lines of code. Every person who builds like this has the same DX (developer experience): "Wow, I've been wanting to build this thing for years now. I just never had the time to do the things I wanted to do to help me and the teams that depend on us" Total cost of AI subscription per month: Less than $1000. Preference is Claude Opus and Codex whatever the latest model is. Effort is a personal preference since it does not seem to matter.

i_have_an_idea

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.

StarlaAtNight

This line made me chuckle. I see what you did there: > No cookies. No tracking. No JavaScript. Real people.

argee

> 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.

TurdF3rguson

And we use Claude Code to do it, lol.

anonzzzies

We have been doing this for years now: it is great. We build our products faster and better and we get more money for fixing products vibecoded by others. More money in every way.