Comment by lelanthran
10 hours ago
> People in general would recoil in horror if they knew how many essential operations are backed by a mess of Excel sheets with formulas and VBA nobody understands anymore.
Yeah, but that mess is deterministic! With a little bit of rigour, someone with no experience of that specific mess but knowledge of excel from a previous employer will dive in, make a small change, see if the results are messed up, back it out, try again with a different change, and repeat until they get what they want.
Good luck asking an LLM to modify something made by a different LLM 5 years ago.
Deterministic but also very fragile. Excel _still_ doesn't have unit tests or linters.
Someone can accidentally type a static number in place of a formula and it may stick there for years.
Or Excel decides that a name of a gene is a date: https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...
Or Excel silently losing important health data: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988
None of these would've happened with a vibe-coded bespoke tool. A basic elementary level unit test would've caught them instantly.