alt Hacker NewsWhen I quit my day job and started Rails freelancing a big chunk of my work was from companies with "that tech guy" who had built a database in Microsoft Access that was vital to the department's operations. And then either left the company - or the app had started to fall apart under its own weight.
I would get called in to rewrite it, using a proper database, documented rules and ensure it stayed scalable - and everyone would be happy.
These Access "apps" were abominations from a technical point of view - but they got the job done without having to spend a load of money on off-the-shelf or bespoke software. And the "tech guy" made a valuable contribution to the company. It's only at a certain point that Access started to struggle.
I foresee the exact same thing happening in the near future - except we won't be building the replacement apps ourselves - we'll just know how to give the coding agents well-specified prompts and tell them when they're making a mistake.
But at least you could basically follow their logic.
I think what a lot of us are concerned about is that the vibe-coded stuff bloats fast. It's so verbose and all over the place, that picking that thing apart will be a huge job, and relying on an AI to pick apart work that an AI already failed to maintain seem like wishful thinking.
It's literally "The AI is failing! Don't worry I'll just use AI to fix the AI!".