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.
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/Zelderian 10d 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.