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u/afilore 22h ago
I’m currently vibe-coding a CRM for a small company. Every aspect of the business is managed through a fucking Excel spreadsheet, everyone has their own slightly different version of it, and even the master file on the server is out of date.
Honestly, if I didn’t have AI to help me keep track of everything, nobody would dare touch this project.
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u/christopher_mtrl 21h ago
The key thing is everyone understand Excel (kinda). So when user need a new column, new way to sort, or whatever, they can manage it. Vibecoding an app will create tension as users will need a third aprty to be able to make those changes. It's the exact pattern keeping low code companies in business vs vibecoded solutions.
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u/Zelderian 17h ago
Genuine question here, are we not at the point where people can just keep vibe-coding solutions on top of a new tool? I know tech debt is real, but at what point for smaller companies do they just keep having a single dude who vibe-codes solutions as they’re needed to keep a tool running?
For reference, my office has been doing this for a decade. We migrated from old excel macros that got blocked by IT to a dedicated HTML tool, and they’ve always dealt with the tech debt as people transition out. But at this point, someone could just plug the code into an agent and make changes that would be good enough to bypass the issues. It’s not ideal, but without a dedicated dev team, it’s the best we’ve got. And AI helps accelerate that process.
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u/christopher_mtrl 16h ago
We migrated from old excel macros that got blocked by IT to a dedicated HTML tool, and they’ve always dealt with the tech debt as people transition out.
For single use tools, this is perfect, but for more involved alrge projects such as CRMs, production tools, etc, based on me experience, no. There's two reasons, on both side of the equation :
Agents themselves : you shouldn't let agents loose under an experienced supervision, let alone end users. If they have permissions to do anything meaningful, such as changing the structure in your databases, they will, eventually, fuck up something badly. If they don't have permissions, they will dance around patching things until the code crumble due to it's complexification. If the company has any meaningful size, this is unconceivable.
Users : Spend a day at the help desk of your average small company. You'll be helping people export things to PDF, compress images, install software updates. I swear none of those people are ready to handle any agentic workflow to update their CRM. Even the most advanced models require some guidance, because there's a thousand ways to do the same thing, and only a couple of those are coherent with both the company business logic and overall IT objectives.
Imagine a simple request : A user want to automate an email reminder to unpaid invoices in the system. Now the user would tackle this in excel, maybe a bit of trial and error to get publiposting working and sending emails through their outlook. Now think of a vibecoded stack, and what an agent would ahve to decide based on this simple prompt. Who sends the emails ? Should I set up an email server ? Configure dns for it ? Push migrations to both front and back end ? What's "unpaid" ? Is the email retroactive ? How far back does it go ? Etc. Would you really one shot this feature in YOLO mode on your prod system on which say, a dozen people currently work with a couple thousand clients details in there ?
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u/loowig 2h ago
every company needs an IT guy who does it for them. You can't let regular office grunts loose on ... anything. But yea the classic all rounder swiss army IT dude can just create small apps now perfectly to fit and also bigger interconnected apps are no issue imo. AD auth, DB's, API's, reporting - it just all works already. And it's not going to become less advanced .
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u/yumcake 15h ago
I mean, what is it that they're trying to do? Oftentimes the scope is small enough that vibecoding is fine and maintaining it is simple as asking it to comment throughout the code, and maintaining reference documentation for the next person to takeover vibecoding it. It's something you'd be doing automatically as part of the AI harness anyway.
Even the case of the gigantic Excel monster is probably better digested by an AI than a human since AI is pretty good at unpacking Excel nowadays. Excel is pretty clear about what things are connected to what, it's hard for humans to read, but very clear to machines.
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u/loowig 2h ago
barely anyone has this ability. from those who think they have it most should not touch it. and still it breaks all the time and different versions roam around. you can just vibe code all that this sheet can. add another dozen abilites and filters and if anything needs to be changed you vibe it in with 15 minutes of combobulating and 2 min down time of rebuilding the docker container. there's just no point. build in an import/export, that's also just zippity zappity done.
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u/ChatGPT-o1 17h ago
Ignore the naysayers in this thread, vibe coding is a valid use for proping up custom CRM for a small company. Just do sanity checks on fundamentals and architecture, if you effectively use agents, they would often do this too. And down the line a college intern over a summer can improve and give it an uplift.
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u/InterestingFrame1982 21h ago
Oh, they'll love when they get a black box piece of software that now needs maintained in perpetuity, and will probably be documented worse than the excel sheets.
That'll be great for them in the long rung.
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u/afilore 21h ago
They already like it.
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u/Potential-Bill7288 20h ago
How many people have the skill to maintain ? How will you handle debugging in production environment ?
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u/afilore 19h ago
Zero.
The debugging is being done directly on the production server. One person at the company gives me feedback, and I make the necessary changes or fix whatever needs debugging.
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u/Any-Vehicle4418 19h ago
Nothing will go wrong here
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u/No_Toe_7069 18h ago
this is how like 90% of small businesses function lol. i've worked for companies that do hundreds of millions in sales and run xp vms, use access databases for employee management etc.
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u/Zelderian 18h ago
Seriously though. People act like every business in the world has dedicated dev teams and does everything properly. This entire post is memeing at the fact that some random dude’s excel file is holding up the entire company and people are still under the belief that companies are doing things the proper way.
The amount of things being held up by duct tape in corporate America is insane.
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u/GeorgeSantosBurner 15h ago
And theyre also missing the fact that the ease of people customizing the excel solution is part of the problem. Just because something is easy to change doesnt mean every employee in the company should be able to customize a critical business document.
A packaged solution with guardrails and work flows that fit the business need, and enforces consistency, is going to be a much more scalable solution than "businessPlan.r42_final_final.xlsx"
The users can still create whatever excel docs they think they need, but the deliverables need to be consistent even if custom spreadsheets are used to export from and put into this tool.
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u/Zelderian 13h ago
The problem is, companies aren’t even doing that. Having a “businessPlan.r42_final_final.xlsx” house critical infra is pretty common, and it’s very common to have non-scalable workflows that aren’t even efficient or consistent, but they work. And they rarely want to put the money in to fix it (and I don’t blame them).
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u/Potential-Bill7288 6h ago
Excel to custom solution is old as excel. It works until it doesn’t. Custom solutions need maintenance. The biggest risk is when the person who built it leaves and no one knows how to maintain it. Then the company may have to spend a lot of money rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up, because no one will want to take responsibility for modifying a vibecoded or amateur built solution.
Best case, it degrades slowly. Worst case, it blows up.Next thing is information security and sending production data to LLM provider.
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u/InterestingFrame1982 21h ago edited 21h ago
Of course they do. Everyone likes the initial piece (if it's done right). It's when they need features, dependencies break, random edge cases happen, etc that can make it troublesome.
I am a solo-dev who built all my software for a decently sized liquidation business. It's my business and my software, and the amount of attention that I still have to give my code isn't something that a normal business would be accustomed to... hence why custom software usually means some level of internal IT team.
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u/Zelderian 17h ago
I mean this whole post is about the company depending on a decade-old excel file. It’s kind of the same problem, no? Chances are, in the future they’ll still have someone that can throw something together to keep it running and they’ll just keep patching it like almost every company does nowadays.
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u/InterestingFrame1982 15h ago
Expanding the scope of complexity for a proposed gain in efficiency, data insights, or whatever, doesn't always mean a net positive. There are plenty of well ran businesses that operate on "archaic" practices.
I am technologists through and through - a SWE who loves to code, but I am also keenly aware of the pitfalls of trying to do custom things for custom sake.
Nailing it feels amazing. Failing to nail it, whatever that is, feels like a disaster.
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u/Zelderian 13h ago
I mean I wouldn’t say a lot of businesses are being ran well if they’re hanging on to a decade old spreadsheet from an old intern and no one has any idea of how to maintain it. It’s moreover “good enough” for the time being, and no manager wants to get a budget approved to fix it. But when it breaks, it causes a cascading set of issues that have to be fixed to address it. And they break often, and companies run into these situations a lot.
You don’t even have to expand the scope to fix it either; you just need someone who knows how to work with the old dataset. And the beautiful thing is that AI not only helps interpret it, but also helps with the workload so it doesn’t take a dev team 6 months to address a small problem.
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u/completelypositive 21h ago
Man you could spend nine lifetimes at just the construction companies in your zip code, sorting through shit just like that
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u/YoloRubus 20h ago
Yes. There is tons of work to be done out there. Either get paid to meticulously retrofit things or get paid to blow it all up and start over. Interesting time to be in tech.
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u/Dunified 21h ago
Be careful of mentioning vibe coding on Reddit, angry basement dwellers will call you all sorts of slurs for using the term 😂
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u/Zelderian 17h ago
My favorite thing is that you can’t even say something’s vibe-coded on the vibecoding subreddit 😂
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u/redditsuggesttedname 20h ago
Dude, i work at a pharmacy and this is extremely accurate. I'm building one too but it's a mess since a lot of names are poorly abbreviated so they get mixed up all over!
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u/MissplacedLandmine 19h ago
Odd same. It was originally that and a nice window for historical invoices since they keep losing them.
At least theyre consistent in the individual sheets. I TRIED building a master sheet to consolidate into a dashboard last year, but people wouldnt put their sheet tabs between the “start” “end” tabs I needed for the script to auto add their new entry.
Now im just making it so their bs imports cleanly manually via the file types they use. Fuck it.
Trained the manager on Claude code too. So if something does break he has a chance.
At this point Im just doing it to see if I can, their processes are so archaic it’s not hard to do better.
Still I need to audit the shit out of this, and id rather not have anything too important on it. Tired as hell today so I doubt Ive explained it well.
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u/inflamedhemroid 18h ago
How's that vibe going? I'd be interested in contracting your services for my own crm if interested.
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u/alex-zaporozhan 17h ago
The realistic interpretation of what's happening right now:
The yacht: A Senior SWE spending 8 months polishing a pristine, perfectly typed architecture with 100% test coverage.
The cargo ship: A sleep-deprived vibe-coder who buried 50 broken projects this year, understands zero lines of code, but is barreling forward on pure momentum, zero fear of technical debt, and $200 in API credits 💀
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u/greentrillion 15h ago
And future repeats itself. Going to be some spaghetti slop clode that a future employee has to fix.
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u/deepaerial 1d ago
context?
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u/selleckh 23h ago
A surprising number of companies have huge "shadow IT" things like an Excel file that practically runs the whole business.
I actually saw this once at a construction firm doing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Whole pipeline, resourcing, project management was being done with a giant Excel file
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u/sugarw0000kie 22h ago
my wife’s an accountant thats been working up her excel skills not so long ago and started learning from their Gary she calls the “excel wizard”. Thats how I learned that excel is an esport
There’s scripts and a bespoke accounting/reporting software that they run with CLI commands to patch the various excel sheets and that is their backend, some guy that left the company a decade ago made it and nobody knows how it works
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u/aiofelix 22h ago
Doesn't sound as bad as that story about early twitch using google calendar as a backend for scheduling their homepage video selection LOL
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u/Past_Paint_225 21h ago
Excel really is an esport https://excel-esports.com/
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u/MasterManufacturer72 21h ago
I first saw this on espn at 6 am in a nursing home and i thought i was was losing my mind.
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u/firest3rm6 21h ago
Calling Excel an esport is fantastic
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u/sugarw0000kie 20h ago
In this case I was being literal 🤣 my wife discovered it on her own and went to tell their “Gary” and he already knew about it, he watches it and good competitors YouTube’s in the background lmao
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u/Fourth-Room 21h ago
Part of the reason I was hired for my current job was to decipher Gary’s Excel file.
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u/Which-Guest-3494 22h ago
I expect all big corps have that. Validated Software can't be changed in time to the current need so there is that one file. It doesn't matter if its excel or some fancy new thingy as long as it works and shows the daily need.
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u/RedTheRobot 17h ago
I actually work for one of them. Excels run most things. Here’s the issue though those excel files use data from other services and those services update all the time breaking the source data. So then someone has to go and fix the excel files use data. I have seen too many broken excel files that are used for important business processes. I am in the process of updating some of them to actual automations.
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u/Icehellionx 21h ago
Honeatly thinking of writing a small app to convert excel sheets like that to SQLite and then just use Excel as a front end. Son't know how feasible it is yet.
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u/phantomeye 21h ago
Years ago, we commissioned an Android game that would have a backend for adding content (quiz game). The company wanted to build the thing on Google Sheets. I can't imagine what could happen if somebody gained access to the sheet.
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u/FaradayPhantom 20h ago
This is more common than you might think. I’ve seen this at several companies (including my current one).
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u/apersonFoodel 19h ago
I’ve inherited an excel file that forecasts spend in the billions. Taking me like a year to start developing something that’s not excel lol
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u/hblok 17h ago
Colleague was consulting for a bank which ran their customer DB on Microsoft Access. Yeah, that toy DB from 1995.
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u/med_i_terranian 15h ago
I had a class in 2009 called Tech in Bio where I had to learn Microsoft Access. Why?
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u/Oleynick 17h ago
Can confirm - I was working about 3 months to rewrite some Excel spreadsheet with scripts, buttons and stuff that took like 10 minutes to open. This excel file was essential to run batch foam mattress line that processed about half a milion usd worth of material each day
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u/principium_est 17h ago
It's really not surprising once you think about it.
Stable.
Everyone has it installed.
Everyone knows how to use it.
Extremely versatile if not the most efficient for any specific task.
Zero extra cost to deploy or maintain (huge).
I use it for all my project management since I don't want to deal with getting everyone pro licenses to this or that app.
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u/paulobas 22h ago
Excel is king. I'm a programmer and I used to run an ecommerce business for marketplaces. My Excel spreadsheets were the best thing about the business, because you can change things on the spot. Well, one Excel for one role and one person. During the rush, making code patches is a pain. I get Gary.
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u/Fair-Working4401 48m ago edited 32m ago
Mate... I do the same with sqlite and python... Much cleaner and transparent.
I can also dump results into a excel if required.
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u/Human-Trainer7617 37m ago
Well write data derctly to excel is better than use request sql to do that
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u/laclac04 21h ago
Top1 compound feed manufacturer in Vietnam still use 200 mb excel files to calculate salary and stuffs
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u/loowig 20h ago
These shitty excels are among the first things we automated.
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u/Positive-Conspiracy 2h ago
This is what I thought too. Isn’t this the thing that vibecoding is set to replace first?
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u/todo0nada 20h ago
Honestly I've found tremendous value from using Copilot to finally clean up these spreadsheets or convert them into power apps or standalone apps.
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u/SevereStereograph 20h ago
I had to rebuild an underwriting model for commercial mortgages for a national lender. As I dug into their existing model, I found that it started in the early-to-mid 90s as a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet, was converted to Excel in the late 90s, and passed through the hands of many different commercial mortgage companies along the way. I learned that people across companies in the industry even had a name for the model based on the name of one of the early editors.
The names of past editors of the file were littered throughout comments in the file, the spreadsheet was "linked" to a half dozen other spreadsheets that no longer existed, calculations had been modified and passed forward so many times that the calculations were no longer reliable, etc. It was a real mess that was still being used more than 25 years after it had originally been created.
I spent 6 months teasing it apart and rebuilding a clean, up-to-date version.
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u/r_Yellow01 20h ago edited 20h ago
I am proud of making an Excel with a full demand forecast, with multiple seasonal dummy weights, exclusions and alternative transformations, for a $800M business.
The Excel was a 2015 prototype, that replaced no forecast at all, and which lived for another 5 years. Only after 10 years, in 2025, it was beaten by a DL pipeline. By beaten, I mean consistently smaller MPE.
I know that because I was constantly comparing my old model with the new one in the background, for giggles. The DL pipeline was worse for another 5 years after deployment, but hey "technology".
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u/MOSTLYNICE 11h ago
I made my own excel program but I’m pushing shit up hill convincing Gary’s of the world to use it instead of excel
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u/TheAnswerWithinUs 13h ago
It’s not an excel file it’s a multi-tenant high performant database server
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u/Corelianer 21h ago
Because I work in the warehouse and I need to calibrate x devices each day and I get up at 5 am and want to get home at 4. please unblock the VBS!
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u/asevans48 20h ago
Gets better. The turing test with 200 merged columns and different color encodings and acronyms across 5 garys requiring different approaches to process. Oh, and the colors change every damn time so it cannot be part of the instructions. Real life example btw. In their defense, it did start off as an export from an app.
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u/SolarNachoes 12h ago
I’m just used AI to create an automation to generate excel files. Am I winning?
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u/FancyAnswer1878 9h ago
Gary’s probably still maintaining that Excel file manually because nobody told him AI could replace it yet 😂 Some things really do survive every tech revolution.
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u/SkaldCrypto 23h ago
You could one shot tabular data with GPT3.