Cleanup
12 years in and im starting to see something familiar. Around 2010 i made decent money fixing what offshore contractor work left behind. Founders thought they were getting the same product for a quarter of the price, then 18 months later they were paying someone like me to make it actually work
We're heading into the same cycle just with AI as the cheap labor. We picked up two repos at work last month from a non-technical exec who got bored of his lovable apps. The codebases are the kind of thing where every individual file looks fine but the system doesnt hold together. Weird abstractions everywhere, basic stuff missing where it actually matters, and that distinct AI comment style throughout. Database migrations bolted on as an afterthought, logging in all the wrong places
The pattern isn't new. Cheap POC code works for demos and seed rounds, and then real usage breaks it. Doesn't matter where the cheap code came from, Claude, a junior, or some agency overseas. What the industry keeps relearning is that you can speed up the typing but the systems thinking has to happen somewhere or it gets paid for later
A generation of products is getting shipped by people who skipped the part where you understand what you're building. Now they're bored or stuck and the refactor wave is gonna be massive. My day rate is going up next quarter and im not even apologizing about it
EDIT: getting a few DMs asking if i use AI at all. yeah i use it daily, mostly glm-5.1 for the building stuff and Opus when something needs real reasoning. just not as a replacement for thinking, i review what it gives me. thats the whole position.
