alt Hacker NewsMy SO works in legal and regulatory compliance, she needed a small app (worflow with a form and a validation process), CTO said they could not do it, too complicated, would cost 15 days for a freelance and rejected it. She called it BS, and the next day she spent the morning with ChatGPT using their internal Microsoft-based tooling, and the app was done. She was hyped for the day, with a feeling of accomplishment and is already thinking of another project. And I'm hearing similar stories every week.
So yes, LLM have positive impacts in many business domains, but seeing people happy and enpowered with their home-made little apps, I think it's the best.
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And I'm sure the business logic has been validated and tested, the hosting and execution medium has been secured, and hooking up to a curated and vetted internal package manager mirror so as not to get hit with 0-days during a shai hulud-esque attack, and of course the executable is being scanned for vulnerabilities, and as the app needs to evolve in the future it will be able to do so with no problems whatsoever.
I’ve had two separate similar experiences. The most impressive was my little sister publishing an app on both Google and Apple AppStore’s with subscription payment support. She didn’t even know what an Apple developer account was. I gave her a three line prompt to get started and then she took it from there. She built an LMS for HS students that gets them in shape for college admissions. She has a supabase backend, AI generated videos, quizzes, more content, and all the usual mobile app bells and whistles, she made it through all the paperwork of App Store submission/review/publishing on both platforms including inviting some beta testers. Her workflow was telling ChatGPT what she wanted and then asking that model to talk to claudecode. It doesn’t sound like much but keep in mind she has absolutely zero code or tech experience. I told her she did about a $75k project on her own in maybe 1/5 the time and it blew her away.
It may be a success or maybe not who knows but she did it. I think she has 4 or 5 paying customers.
If her company has any brains, they'll tell her to stick to her job and not waste time on untested software developed by somebody who has no clue what they are doing.
Yes maybe the long term impact will be there won’t be a technology sector (at least not so dominant as it is now). Instead companies in other industries will have larger technology functions with teams of agents.
I really love these stories - as a contractor who fixes the badly implemented shadow IT crap
aaaand let me guess? have they assessed whether this tool needs backups? monitoring? resilience? patching? obviously in 5 years time the author would have left leaving NO documentation on a mission critical 'small' app - likely hosted with a shit ton of other mission critical crap
It's MS Access all over again, my future rates are looking good
seriously it's like going back to the 90's
So, someone made use of a software creation tool to create software, quickly.
Does that software directly utilize ai?
We've heard of "Shadow IT" now we have "Shadow SWE" and "Shadow CI/CD".
It used to be that someone wanted unfettered Internet access, and they were disgruntled with the company's firewall or proxy policy, and so they brought in a modem, and hooked it up to their desktop PC, and started dialing out on some analog line that the company didn't even know they had. Then it's all fine for 3 years until some malware gets discovered, and then IT discovers who-all had unauthorized lines that weren't being scanned or filtered at the company firewall. Same thing happens with WiFi APs today, of course.
I was working for a company that really offered no in-house software or tools to run. But my new supervisor was asking me to closely track my time. So I signed up for some SaaS that would let me log activities and track my timeslices, so I could show a graph or table later on and see what I was doing. I used it for a few weeks. It was real effective. But what I realized down the line, was that all the notes I was typing into this 3rd-party SaaS, were revealing company confidential information. And ultimately, I felt very uncomfortable about revealing what I was doing, on an unannounced and private project, and without authorization or even notifying my employer's IT department. So I shut it all down, and I had to do it with pen and paper, but that felt secure enough.
So if people are going to feel empowered by vibe coding their own bespoke apps, I hope their IT department comes down like a ton of bricks, and tells them to knock it off. Because it is not worth the tech debt, support costs, and ultimately the massive security problems and infoleaks. If your employer won't give you what you need in these terms, then maybe it's just not important to them in the first place.
For most businesses, it’s going to be business as usual. By the time businesses see the benefits of AI, their competitors that actually leveraged AI will have pulled too far ahead.
If the original company has distribution, they can likely catch up, but the gap we see between AI-first companies and the companies not utilizing AI will broaden exponentially in the coming years.