[theshrike79]

If the choices are: Use excel/sheets or something massive in a janky way, pay someone to build it for me (massive cost) or DIY with LLM

The "pay someone to build it" is definitely the one I wouldn't touch, or even consider.

If it's a good idea, they'll already have the code and will run away and make their own business with it. If it's a bad idea, I've wasted a bunch of money.

And in both cases I'd need to spend an inordinate amount of time explaining the terminology and use-cases to the contractor, book meetings with them during office hours to talk about requirements and get demos etc.

With an LLM I can be walking the dog late at night, get an idea, and within 2 minutes I'll have Claude working on it via my phone.

Then I come back home and maybe test whether it worked while watching TV.

If I had fuck you money, I might have a contractor on call that would agree to workflows like that, but I'm just a middle class software dev so I don't :D