When 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.

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mattmanser 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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!".

	▲	rahoulb 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The worst I would ever get was "here's our Access database - can you rewrite it". That was utterly useless to me. What I needed to do was sit with a user (not a manager/the person buying my services) and ask them to show me the different things they did with the software. Then I could write a spec for the actual _feature_ and would only need to look at the existing codebase if they needed data transferring across[1]. I don't see why our new LLM-based future would be any different [1] Of course this meant I would leave out edge-cases and/or weird quirks of the system - often this was actually a bonus as they were either no longer relevant or worked that way because that was the only way they knew how to do it
	▲	sersi 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, as long as context size increase and llm improve at least there's a way out through using AI but once the progress stops...