Codebase Rescue & Hardening
Vibe coding got you somewhere. We get you out.
30 years of senior software engineering, applied to AI-generated code, prototypes that grew up too fast, and the tech debt you may not even know you have.
Why this exists
AI is a powerful tool — and a dangerous one without senior guidance.
The same models that let a single developer ship in a weekend will also confidently invent APIs, regenerate the same logic five different ways across one repo, drop auth checks during a refactor, and produce business logic that looks right and is subtly wrong.
The slop compounds quietly. By the time it shows up — as an outage, a security finding, a failed audit, or a feature velocity that mysteriously fell off a cliff — the cost of cleanup is 10x what it would have been with a senior reviewer in the loop from week one.
That's where we come in. Not to lecture about vibe coding. To clean it up, harden what's worth keeping, and put guardrails in place so it doesn't happen again.
What AI slop actually looks like in a codebase
Hallucinated APIs and dead abstractions
Functions that import libraries that don't exist, wrappers around wrappers, helpers that duplicate built-ins. Looks coherent; isn't.
Copy-paste compounding
The same logic implemented 6 different ways across the repo because each prompt regenerated it from scratch. Bug-fix cost grows non-linearly.
Quiet security regressions
Auth checks dropped in a refactor, secrets logged for 'debug visibility', SQL built with string concatenation 'because the linter didn't complain'.
Plausible but wrong business logic
Edge cases the model didn't know to ask about — silently producing answers your users trust until they don't.
How the engagement runs
Four phases. Surgical, not scorched-earth.
Most codebases don't need a rewrite. They need a senior pair of eyes, a triaged punch list, and the discipline to fix the right things in the right order.
- 01
Audit
We read the code. Manual review by senior engineers, augmented by static analysis, dependency scanning, test-coverage mapping, and architecture diagramming. You get a prioritized findings register — by risk, not by line count.
- 02
Stabilize
The top-tier findings get fixed first: security holes, data-integrity bugs, broken auth, anything an adversary or a regulator would notice on day one. No rewrite — surgical fixes with tests so the next change doesn't undo them.
- 03
Harden
We straighten the architecture where it's bent: dedupe parallel implementations, restore type safety, add the test coverage that should have been there, document the system as it now actually behaves, and put guardrails in CI so AI-generated code can't reintroduce the same patterns.
- 04
Hand back
You get a clean baseline, a written remediation report, an updated architecture doc, and a CI pipeline that catches regressions. Your team can keep using AI to build — they just can't accidentally re-rot the codebase.
Who this is for
If any of these sound familiar.
- A prototype built fast with AI tools is now running in production and you're not sure what's actually in it.
- A non-engineer (or junior engineer) shipped a working v1 and the team that has to maintain it is asking hard questions.
- Velocity has slowed and bugs are reappearing in places that were already fixed.
- A security review, SOC 2 audit, or customer questionnaire surfaced findings nobody can explain.
- You inherited a codebase from a contractor or earlier team and need to know what you actually own.
- You want to keep using AI tools for development — but with senior guardrails, code review, and a CI pipeline that catches the patterns that hurt you.
What we won't do
Honest about scope.
- We don't tell you to throw it all out. Rewriting is usually wrong and almost always slower than remediation.
- We don't moralize about AI tooling. We use it ourselves — under senior review, with guardrails. The problem isn't the tool, it's unsupervised acceptance.
- We don't gatekeep. If you want to learn the patterns we apply so your team can run them, we'll teach them.
- We tell you when there's no problem. If the audit comes back clean, you get the report and we shake hands.
Start small
A two-week rescue audit usually tells you what you're dealing with.
Fixed fee. Written report. A prioritized findings register, an architecture overview, and a recommendation on what — if anything — to remediate. You can take it anywhere.