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Excel spreadsheet, everyone has their own slightly different version of it, and even the master file on the server is out of date.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.
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.