|
With all due respect to what Jason Fried &co have achieved, this is wrong. Bespoke sofware does exist. And yes, consultants small and large have built, deployed, and charged through the roof for bespoke software. And often it sucks. Here's why it sucks: because clients can't coherently describe what they need, don't have a budget, consultancies don't care and - critically - the person writing the spec (and controling the budget) isn't the same person that will use it. (here you also have "A Tragedy of EdTech" in one sentence, but that's a different post) But there's another kind of bespoke software, which, for a lack of a better name, I'll unimaginatively call "internal tool". This is what VB6/Access/VBA/HyperCard enabled back in the day, what Retool tried to own recently, and what many Excel spreadsheets are secretly doing. This is duct-taped-code-pasta that barely holds but does exactly what the business needs, and nothing more. I've seen and heard of many cases already of non-techies doing exactly that. It's not scalable, it's not maintainable, it doesn't follow best practices, it doesn't have tests or docs, but it doesn't matter, because it works and solves a biz problem. The reason it works is that the person can iteratively narrow down to what they need, feedback is instant, iteration is minutes not days or weeks and is super cheap (compared to external developers). No sane freelancer or agency would ship something like it - for many reasons: as a software engineer you want to ship quality product and charge appropriate amount of money. Many times, that's the right thing for the customers. Often, it's overkill, and these types of smaller "quick win" projects never get started in the first place. And there's loads of potential projects like these! So yeah, nobody will vibe-code a payroll system for 100+ person company, nor should they. But people absolutely will, and already do, whip up something that solves their niche problem. Now maybe they'll use AI instead of Excel. |
Excel is 'free-at-point-of-use', i.e. once you've paid for it, to use it doesn't cost anymore. But LLMs do cost per use (unless we all go to local models). Either this cost is billed directly, or some sort of bundling occurs with 'fair use' limits.
Excel is deterministic, yes scary spaghetti-fied spreadsheets are routinely constructed, but, for example, sorting a result column somewhere can be done with a bit of poking in the right place. LLMs have a tendency to dangerously change many things if the prompting is a bit wrong (and even if it is a bit right).