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Comment by rglullis

10 hours ago

> AI-generated code still requires software engineers

No, they don't.

A domain expert armed with an Excel spreadsheet and the ability to write VBA macros will be enough for most business.

17 comments

rglullis

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zdw  10 hours ago

Excel spreadsheets have little to no validation logic that you're actually getting a good result, unless you have a secondary check (most spreadsheets are structured as "single entry" accounting, so lack the checks)

A prime example of this was the Reinhart/Rogoff paper advocating austerity that was widely quoted, and then it was discovered that the spreadsheet used had errors that invalidated the conclusions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

Just because technology is in use and "works" doesn't mean it's always correct.

  • rglullis  9 hours ago

    You are taking my comment way too literatlly.

    The point is not that people will be using specifically Excel, but that most business only pay for software because it is the tool that gives them the most power to automate their processes. They don't need high availablility, they don't need standards compliance, they don't extensive automated tests, they won't need cloud engineeers and SRE... all you need is some tool that can get the results your are looking for right now.

    Academia already works like this. Software wrtiten for academic purposes is notoriously "bad" because it is not engineerd, but that doesn't matter because it is good enough to deliver the results that researchers need. Corporate IT will also start looking like this even at mid-sized companies.

    • Panzer04  6 hours ago

      An academic paper needs to deliver its output once, for the research. Maybe someone will try to replicate it later but that's someone elses problem (and fairly often proves the output of the former to be wrong)

      Some stuff in companies might be similar, but there's a lot of things that people use every day, in a lot of different ways, and the software needs to work correctly regardless. You can't just drop it like a hot potato once you've built processes around it.

      As always, the first 80% takes 20% of the time/effort, the last 20% takes the other 80%.

    • zdw  8 hours ago

      I don't disagree with anything you say here - using a tool that lacks guardrails is fine for a lot of tasks, but if that's the only tool and used where those guardrails go from "nice to haves" to something more critical is where the problem is.

      I've been in ops for a long time and have encountered far too many "our IP addressing plan is just a spreadsheet with manual reconciliation".

      I truly wonder if Excel and all it's predecessors and direct clones (Google Sheets, etc.) are holding back industry from making something truly better and more reliable.

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1718627440  9 hours ago

That's a software engineer that is limited to an mostly untyped macro language, with worse version control and poor tooling. It's not that software can't be written as an Excel spreadsheet, it is that it is just inefficient and failure prune.

kube-system  10 hours ago

I guess that's technically true, because "most businesses" are sole proprietorships without any employees... but they could get by just fine with a checkbook and a note pad.

But the reasons the business software sector grew far beyond Excel of the 1990s is because of the inherent limitations in scaling solutions built by business analysts inside of Excel. There's a vague cutoff somewhere in the middle of the SMB market where software architecture starts to matter and the consequences for fuckup are higher than the cost of paying for professionally made software with, importantly, a vendor on the hook for making sure it doesn't fuck up.