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I inherited a vibe coded codebase as a senior engineer. How do I fix it? (feddit.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/aicoding@feddit.org
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A friend of mine is a manager who coded their own startup idea with Claude. Since they're not a software engineer, the usual design documents and graphics (flowcharts, infrastructure diagrams) are missing.

I will try to find the golden thread and figure out how the application does things, and if these are the actual intended behaviours my friend wanted the application to fulfill.

However: what else can I do to get a hold of this mess? I thought about using Claude to generate MADRs and application diagrams, but then again, Claude probably talks shit. Any ideas on how to figure out how this application works apart from reading the source code and interviewing my friend about it?

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[–] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 child)

You could use cline/zoo code or similar coding tools to generate project documentation. They will be faulty at some points but (at least in my case (using zoo code & qwen3.6) it works most of the time good enough. It will however take time and you'll still need to fact check any agent.

Or you just trash it and start from scratch. With some restrictions, very detailed descriptions and tiny iterations these llms can generate usable code. But that requires knowledge of the systems your app/program will use.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 weeks ago

    Thank you for the tool suggestions, appreciate it.

    I'm pretty sure this needs a total rewrite, but the software seems to have good functionality where you can get some design documents to start fresh.

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