[simonw]

I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes.

Somehow civilization continues to function!

Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

[ryanmcl]

There's a third category emerging that I think gets overlooked in these discussions = people who couldn't program at all before, who now can. Not replacing programmers, but creating new ones.

I started coding 8 months ago at 45 with zero experience. I now have a production app processing real payments. That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance. Not because I lacked the ability to think through problems, but because the skill floor was too high to clear while also being a parent with no spare years to invest.

The spreadsheet analogy is apt. Most of those amateur spreadsheets aren't replacing finance teams; they're solving small problems that would otherwise go unsolved. That's closer to what's happening with AI-assisted development, I feel, than the "eliminate programmers" framing suggests.

[GuB-42]

The thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they are paying you to make a website shat serves as a storefront, to make a video game, something for accounting,...

It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effectively if your needs match one of their templates, there are game engines that require no code, and a lot of accounting can be done in Excel.

What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest sense of writing something in a programming language, since you are using natural language and code is just an intermediate step that you can see.

The reason programmers use programming languages is not gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate programmers" think. It is that programming languages are very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous, concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it is worth it.

[elzbardico]

No. it was not. You could build a passable online shop after reading a django or ruby on rails book (250, 300 pages), and a couple tutorials to deploy it in some ease to use platform.

Maybe it wouldn't be visually nice, but you would understand what you've built, which is something really really important if you are processing online payments.

[simonw]

Congratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.

[PeterWhittaker]

Thoroughly insightful take!

[guitarbill]

One counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe isn't the best argument.

[simonw]

Sure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets.

It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.

[rsynnott]

In which spreadsheet slop arguably sinks the economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

(This paper was extremely influential in pushing austerity policies of questionable efficacy during the financial crisis.)

We don't want _more_ of this.

[SteveNuts]

> Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy.

The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization.

Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.

[otabdeveloper4]

> Somehow civilization continues to function!

Citation needed, I think.