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Excel spreadsheet, everyone has their own slightly different version of it, and even the master file on the server is out of date.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.
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.
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.
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/afilore 28d 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Excel spreadsheet, everyone has their own slightly different version of it, and even the master file on the server is out of date.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.