The generative AI industry has promised to “disrupt” society, and on that front, it can be said to have succeeded. AI has certainly disrupted many parts of society, including education, social media, and politics. Most of all, it seems to have disrupted the tech industry itself, where what was once a profitable career (software development) increasingly seems to be more of a precarious one, thanks to the rise of so-called “vibe coding”—a form of AI-assisted software development that requires less experience and more automation.
This whole vibe coding thing doesn’t seem to be working out for companies, however, as generating code via an LLM prompt at breakneck speed can, predictably, lead to less-than-stellar work. Now, in an ironic twist, it seems that, having dispensed with more skilled coders for the cheap effectiveness of a chatbot-aided code monkey, companies are having to hire additional contractors to fix the AI’s screw-ups.
404 Media writes about the rise of an entire new class of coders, dubbed the “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” who can swoop in to fix the problems that AI-generated code creates for companies. The outlet cites one description shared with them by a specialist, who said his particular expertise was to “polish” up codebases that might be a little rough around the edges:
“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.”
Siddiqi told 404 that he commonly assists companies with “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.” Yet another cleanup specialist, Swatantra Sohni, told the outlet that they think AI is being leveraged by people who don’t otherwise have the digital skills to build products. The results are predictable:
“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It’s very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don’t think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.”
It’s unclear how widely these services are being offered, but given the rising popularity of vibe-coding amongst small businesses, it seems likely that it would be a growing market. As with many other AI-led industries, humans are still necessary after all.