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Depends on how you define "production". People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheet

Depends on how you define "production". People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. All it needs is the maker mindset of being just lazy enough to be bothered by a repetitive task and the courage (and permission) to use an Agentic LLM to figure out a fix for the issue.

pixl97 9mo ago
Eh, that really depends on how well the LLM understands edge cases of the particular need. Quite often these cases are hidden deep in files nobody understands any longer and will never get in a training set. You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively. This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  Well of-fucking-course you don't vibe code your salary management system =) Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and already has been automated with Excel - to a degree. Now Agentic AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
  - _puk 9mo ago
    someone will cry if you lose money or data.. the rest.. vibe code away!
lelanthran 9mo ago
> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want. Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.
- theshrike79 9mo ago
  Deterministic but also very fragile. Excel _still_ doesn't have unit tests or linters. Someone can accidentally type a static number in place of a formula and it may stick there for years. Or Excel decides that a name of a gene is a date: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... Or Excel silently losing important health data: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 None of these would've happened with a vibe-coded bespoke tool. A basic elementary level unit test would've caught them instantly.

pixl97 9mo ago

Eh, that really depends on how well the LLM understands edge cases of the particular need. Quite often these cases are hidden deep in files nobody understands any longer and will never get in a training set. You end up with a system that works right up to the moment it doesn't and fails spectacularly and expensively. This is one of those reasons you always hear about sweeping medical/hospital records systems being upgraded going tens or hundreds of millions over budget. The edge cases are demons.

theshrike79 9mo ago
Well of-fucking-course you don't vibe code your salary management system =) Just normal non-coder jobs have massive amounts of repetitive crap that could easily be automated - and already has been automated with Excel - to a degree. Now Agentic AI lets them automate the rest - or if they're real smart they use an agentic AI model and create an application to do it that doesn't require a LLM subscription.
- _puk 9mo ago
  someone will cry if you lose money or data.. the rest.. vibe code away!

lelanthran 9mo ago

> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore. Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want. Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.

theshrike79 9mo ago
Deterministic but also very fragile. Excel _still_ doesn't have unit tests or linters. Someone can accidentally type a static number in place of a formula and it may stick there for years. Or Excel decides that a name of a gene is a date: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam... Or Excel silently losing important health data: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988 None of these would've happened with a vibe-coded bespoke tool. A basic elementary level unit test would've caught them instantly.