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by mr_toad 294 days ago
A big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget.

Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.
3 comments
boston_clone 294 days ago
What about a sales person interacting with an LLM that is already authz'd to spin up various cloud resources? I don't think that scenario is too far-fetched...
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VincentEvans 292 days ago
I imagine something along the lines of cloud platforms rolling out functionality that caters to vibe-coding crowd - one stop shop: you enter your prompts and it spins up your code along with the infra. I mean why wouldn’t they - seem like a goldmine.
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Breza 290 days ago
Given how easy it is to spin up GCP resources with a text file, I'm surprised Gemini doesn't already offer this service. The prompt below gave me a 167-line file that uses Cloud Run, Cloud Built, Artifact Registry, Firestore, Maps, and IAM.

>I'm creating an app for dog walkers to optimize their routes. It should take all client locations and then look for dog-friendly cafes for the walker to get lunch and then find the best route. I'm vibe coding this on GCP. Please generate a Terraform file to allocate the necessary resources.

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zurtri 293 days ago
So very true.

And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff.

I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time.

Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.

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boppo1 293 days ago
Why also sorting by row? And why are vlookups the devil? my undergrad was finance, but I've self-learned a lot of CS.
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orand 293 days ago
It's possible to sort just a single column, leaving all the columns beside it in their original sort order. That's very bad if you want to keep your rows in one piece.
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boppo1 291 days ago
Oh, duh yeah. That's such a natural thing to avoid I hadn't considered it
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simultsop 293 days ago
Unless they have a linux with some libre office, I fail to see where there is no budget for Excel. Initially you have to keep up with windows licenses then office.
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denismenace 293 days ago
An Office license is a must in most companies. So it will be there beforehand, you don't have to have a special budget for it.
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