alt Hacker NewsI 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.
Replies
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.
> 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.
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.