> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

It’s much easier to write business logic in code. The entire value of CRUD apps is in their business logic. Therefore, it makes sense to write CRUD apps in code and not some app builder.

And coding assistants can finally help with writing that business logic, in a way that frameworks cannot.

> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago.

People have been trying for literally decades. The problem is that there is just enough uniqueness to every CRUD app that you can't really have "the CRUD app".

I guess it's the sweet spot for AI at the moment because they're 95% all the same but with some fairly simple unique aspects.

CRUD as a concept is flawed. It is more or less any computational system with input -> process -> output. Just as this abstract system can have any complexity, the same is true for any CRUD app.

You don't need Claude to write it. But you cannot generate solid web forms with the same speed. What usually would have taken you a few hours is now solved in much less time.

I doubt software will get cheaper though, requirements will adapt.

If I wanted to make a crud, I’d whip up my own little framework first (a few hours) and then cranking out forms would be almost trivial.

That went 90% down even before AI, Rails and the other frameworks, libraries, tooling have made a big difference compared to earlier years.

The number of lines of code to be written is much, much lower than in the early 2000's.

> These kind of tasks ought to be have been automated a long time ago

They have been, repeatedly, since the 70s. See dBase, Clipper, Microsoft Access, Hypercard, Ruby on Rails, stretching Wordpress to within an inch of its life, all manner of "no-code" things...

And, honestly, Excel. People do all manner of terrifying things with Excel, and it is unquestionably the most successful, and arguably the _only_ successful, "we can do this thing instead of employing a programmer" tool.

Generally, one of two things has happened. Either (a) the products of such automation become unmaintainable nightmares (common for the more automated approaches like MS Access) or (b) they become complex enough that they tend towards 'normal' programming (common with, say, Rails, where you could get a simple CRUD with basically just DSL, but realistically eventually you're gonna be writing lots of Ruby).

I feel like LLM-produced stuff is probably going to fall into column A.

Excel and Google Sheets are indeed where most non-programmers frequently come the closest to programming and actually create useful apps for themselves.

So what’s interesting is that Copilot is basically useless for this task, as is Gemini. How is Microsoft messing up this badly?