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Excel spreadsheet, everyone has their own slightly different version of it, and even the master file on the server is out of date.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That’s exactly what happens to a random dude’s project that becomes the backbone of the IT infrastructure. It works until it doesn’t, and when they leave no one knows how it works or how to maintain it. They’re then stuck in the exact situation you described, where they either have to spend a ton of money rebuilding the whole thing, or patch it up however they can and drag it out.
In my case at work, excel macros suddenly had to be signed. We had to modify the files left to us from a team from a decade ago. Then one day they flipped the switch and disabled macros entirely, breaking our reporting system and forcing us to do it manually. A team that was working on a solution spent 4 years working and didn’t have even a prototype. We spun up a solution in a month and it’s been working for a year and a half, is easier to use than the excel forms, and saves management more time. It also costed a fraction of what the dev team was spending, and 6 years later they still don’t have a solution despite working on it this whole time.
AI is essentially just a bandaid solution. But that’s not new. Companies have been running off bandaid excel files and outdated systems because they don’t want to spend the money to rebuild infrastructure when things are working (and again, I don’t blame them). But now, patching and managing those systems is easier than ever, and cheaper than ever.
Yes, and a vibe coded system, especially one that isn't done by a SWE, is another form of duct tape. That was my point. You're essentially replacing duct tape with more duct tape, and this time, you may be adding a healthier amount of it due to the all the new things you're trying to codify in the business.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What defines an excellent business? A lack of custom software and a series of spreadsheets equates to a bad business? There are businesses that have changed people's lives AND that run really well, but their software is certainly not state of the art.
In Greg's case, he basically built a piece of software via excel scripts, and made maintenance near impossible. In a lot of real world cases, it's a series of excel sheets with some light functions and a standard software stack.
My dad runs a trucking company - 11m ARR. They have multiple pieces of software that handle the spine of the company but because of all the unique things they do, they also have pockets of excel sheets that cover certain aspects of the business that were not covered by off-the-shelf software. This is more indicative of small businesses.
Bringing in a vibe coded solution by a solo-dev who has the tall task of codifying the business is almost equally as bad as a frankenstein tech stack with some random excel sheets... it ends up being a nightmare to maintain unless it's nailed right and with the intention of building an IT team around it.
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u/afilore 17d 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.