Confidently Wrong

In two days I had two customers that sent me a zip file containing an Odoo module and asked to install it on their server. This is new and for some reason made me angry.

Developing Odoo modules and maintaining them over many Odoo versions is what I am doing as an Odoo developer for the past six year. My experience and learning from others has been accumulated into many best practices and patterns.

Is this only about pride or much more? Let’s find out.

When I checked the code of the modules sent be these customers, I knew right away that it has been generated by Claude. Compared to what I build, it was utter garbage. And believe me, this is not gate-keeping. The code lacked any good practices and implemented almost any anti-pattern there.

But the request of the customer was clear. And the customer felt very confident that the module will solve his problem. In my opinion he was confidently wrong

Should I just move along and let the code break the entire system and then ask the customer to fix it? This is not a risk I am willing to take. Also I am still responsible for the system. But how to move forward from this kind of situation?

I decided to push back. At least a little and ask some basic questions that were obviously not asked by Claude:

• Who is the actual author of the code?
• Who is taking responsibility?
• Are there any specifications?
• What prompts / skills have been used to implement the modules?
• How should this code be maintained?
• Has the code been tested?
• If yes, which Odoo environment has been used to do so?
• …

For my company I answered these questions many years ago. In that regards everything feels like a regression. For sure I do not have to explain how frustrating this situation is. Two very different expectations collide.

In order to move onwards I prepared the following texts:

1. Generating the code is the easy part, we already do that for many years. Even before LLMs and ChatGPT is was possible to generate code from simple instructions.
2. Instead of sending us the code, we would rather see a specification with your requirements.
3. In case you want to vibe-code new modules, we ask you to setup our Odoo development environment. It provides all the tools (guidelines, skills) so you can develop your own Odoo modules.

Pick your poison.