> Not parent poster, but I imagine it will be a bit like the horror stories of companies (ab)using spreadsheets in lieu of a proper program or database: They will use an LLM to get half-working stuff "for free" and consider it a bargain, especially if the detectable failures can be spot-fixed by an intern doing data-entry.

When I read things like this I really wonder if half of the people on HackerNews have ever held a job in software development (or a job at all to be fair).

None of what you describe is even remotely close to reality.

Stuff that half works gets you fully fired by the client.

If you can't even believe that kludgy-shit exists out there in the world, then it sounds like you've led a sheltered existence climbing within a very large engineering department of a well-funded company.

Do you perhaps have any friends at companies which hired overseas contractors? Or system-admins working at smaller companies or nonprofits? They're more-likely to have fun stories. I myself remember a university department with a master all_students.xls file on a shared drive (with way too many columns and macros in it) that had to be periodically restored from snapshots every time it got corrupted...

Are you sure you read the post you’re quoting correctly? They’re talking about companies that don’t have custom software at all, and cobble together half-working buggy spreadsheets and call the problem solved. Then the developers (either FT or contract) have to come in and build the tool that kills the spreadsheeet, once it gets too unwieldy.

I have seen the above story play out literally dozens of times in my career.