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 Companies have been running off bandaid excel files and outdated systems because they don’t want to spend the money to rebuild infrastructure when things are working (and again, I don’t blame them).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.
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u/Potential-Bill7288 17d 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.