I often think about how the modern world genuinely does run on Excel formulas, many written by amateurs, most without automated tests and with version control based on final_final_v2 suffixes.

Somehow civilization continues to function!

Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy. It's not that different from how things work already.

There's a third category emerging that I think gets overlooked in these discussions = people who couldn't program at all before, who now can. Not replacing programmers, but creating new ones.

I started coding 8 months ago at 45 with zero experience. I now have a production app processing real payments. That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance. Not because I lacked the ability to think through problems, but because the skill floor was too high to clear while also being a parent with no spare years to invest.

The spreadsheet analogy is apt. Most of those amateur spreadsheets aren't replacing finance teams; they're solving small problems that would otherwise go unsolved. That's closer to what's happening with AI-assisted development, I feel, than the "eliminate programmers" framing suggests.

Congratulations. This is my favorite aspect of this whole thing: LLM tooling that's helping new people break into programming by lowering the friction and learning curve.

But the friction and learning curve is what helps you understand what you’re doing. The friction is an integral part of the process.

The friction is why so many people never make it far up enough the learning curve to build something useful that solves their problems.

You could say the same thing about learning to fly a plane or play the piano. I’ve got no problem with people using llms to write useful utilities and programs for themselves, but it is leading us into a world where people are creating powerful things they don’t understand. That’s going to have consequences. We are already witnessing some of them.

Both things are true simultaneously. The friction taught me things I wouldn't have learned otherwise; and the reduced friction is the only reason I got far enough to encounter that friction in the first place.

I still debug production issues manually. I still read error logs line by line. The AI got me to the starting line faster but it didn't skip the/my race.

Thoroughly insightful take!

The thing is that programming is not an end goal, it is a means to a end. No one is paying you to "write code", they are paying you to make a website shat serves as a storefront, to make a video game, something for accounting,...

It turns out that in many of these cases, code is an effective way of doing it, but there may be other options. For a storefront, there are website builders that let you do it very effectively if your needs match one of their templates, there are game engines that require no code, and a lot of accounting can be done in Excel.

What I wanted to say is that maybe you could have done without code, but thanks to LLMs making code a viable option even for beginners, that's what you went for. In fact, vibe coding is barely even coding in the strictest sense of writing something in a programming language, since you are using natural language and code is just an intermediate step that you can see.

The reason programmers use programming languages is not gatekeeping, unlike what many people who want to "eliminate programmers" think. It is that programming languages are very good at what they do, they are precise, unambiguous, concise and expressive. Alternatives like natural languages or graphical tools lack some of these attributes and therefore may not work as well. Like with many advanced tools, there is a learning curve, but once you reach a certain point, like when you intend to make it your job, it is worth it.

Good lord, thank you. I'm a huge fan of LLMs, they've replaced enormous amounts of toil for me but they are not 'my job'.

If you walk to the kitchen and fry up an egg are you now a master chef? What's the difference between a surgeon and a butcher ...they both cut things?

Most shops never really needed development expertise in-house as there's no shortage of many decent tools equally suitable as code for getting machines to do most business things.

In some ways this is worse because while it's functionally the same black box intermediary as the alternative-to-code tools there's an illusion of control and more sunk cost. Do you want your sales team selling or learning JavaScript churning out goofy knock-offs for a well-solved problem?

No. it was not. You could build a passable online shop after reading a django or ruby on rails book (250, 300 pages), and a couple tutorials to deploy it in some ease to use platform.

Maybe it wouldn't be visually nice, but you would understand what you've built, which is something really really important if you are processing online payments.

> That was genuinely impossible for someone like me before AI assistance

Ummm... No? That was literally what people have done for decades? Is the implication that you feel you are too old to read a book at 45 and start programming?

Sure, you will make hundreds of unintended decisions along the way that a seasoned developer would scoff at (for good reason), but a functioning first application in half a year when learning on the job is exactly what people have done, always. Is it a good idea? Well, it is always better to have a professional at hand to help and do away with the beginner's problems from the beginning, but it's absolutely doable.

Programming is not a black art, but something anyone with a bit of logical thinking can pick up from a book. Hence the "Learn yourself Java in 48 hours" books the were so popular for a while.

Fair point...I should have said "practically impossible given my constraints" rather than "genuinely impossible." You're right that people have learned from books for decades.

What changed for me wasn't capability, it was feedback loops. A book can't tell me why my specific Stripe webhook is failing at 2am. The combination of AI assistance plus actually building something real kept me from hitting the walls that stopped me the three previous times I tried to learn.

But you're right that the skill existed before the tooling. The tooling just compressed the timeline enough to fit inside the life I already had.

I think your example highlights one of the places where even the current level of AI can be helpful and enabling, rather than a competitor for jobs, which is helping a person learn something new. Not always in all subjects (do NOT learn to fly a plane solely by AI, I say this as a flight instructor), and the person has to be careful to verify accuracy, but still it can be amazingly useful, and endlessly patient.

One counter-example is the Horizon IT scandal. Obviously, you didn't say this directly, but "only a few people died/were affected, somehow civilization continues to function" maybe isn't the best argument.

Sure, that scandal was horrific. I don't think the root cause was amateurs with bad spreadsheets.

It was an institutional failure, and the software involved had hundreds of millions of pounds spent on it and was built by supposed professionals.

Sure, we can ignore that specific example, and that software has an effect on the world, and that people have been trained to expect software to be deterministic and accurate.

Or if you want compare vibe coding with any technology, like electricity. Sure, that one person got electrocuted or their house burned down. But it's just so useful, and "somehow civilization continues to function". I guess they should've known better.

I'm personally not comfortable hyping up the benefits whilst ignoring the risks, especially for lay people.

> we can ignore that specific example

We are not ignoring it. It is just not an example of a load bearing excel sheet.

Try this https://theconversation.com/the-reinhart-rogoff-error-or-how...

> Makes me a bit less terrified that untested vibe coded slop will sink the economy.

The difference is those spreadsheets were buried on a company internal fileshare and the blast radius would be contained to that organization.

Today vibe coders can type a prompt, click a button, and their thing is exposed directly to the internet and ready to suck up any data someone uploads.

In which spreadsheet slop arguably sinks the economy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

(This paper was extremely influential in pushing austerity policies of questionable efficacy during the financial crisis.)

We don't want _more_ of this.

> Somehow civilization continues to function!

Citation needed, I think.

> non-programmers began programming without knowing they were

Using excel in the traditional sense isn't the same as programming. Unless they were doing some VBA or something like that which the vast majority of excel/spreadsheet users don't.

> spreadsheet formulae

formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.

> I see an analog with AI-generated code: the disciplined among us know we are programming and consider error and edge cases, the rest don't.

Programming isn't really about edge cases or errors.

> formulas. We aren't speaking latin here.

Define "here", please! Perhaps your "here" and mine differ, but the view from my here is that while all three plurals are generally acceptable, formulae is the correcter double plus good spelling for this context.

Excel was the biggest example of a "4GL" that actually succeeded. They mentioned Access but Excel was by far more widely used. Excel enabled analysts to do so much on their own that they used to have to ask programmers in their IT department to do. Other spreadsheets too, at first, but Excel ended up dominating.

And it was an excellent local optimization that incurred giant costs for the whole organization. Every single place where there are this parallel excel IT world is a fucking security/compliance/data-security nightmare.

> began programming without knowing they were

Worse, they were doing functional programming just by chaining formulas without side effects, surpassing the skills of most self-proclaimed programmers out there.

I have a feeling that the cost of bad / inefficient / late software runs into at least the billions. The biggest risks are unavoidably attached to the most costly software projects, that are probably the most likely to be conducted in the most sophisticated and professional fashion with the latest silver bullet methodologies.

The Mythical Man Month is just over half a century old, yet still reads like it was written yesterday.

A particularly alarming case: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54423988

And then of course there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt#Metho...

> Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?

Well, they apparently haven't with spreadsheets, 50 years on, so I wouldn't be optimistic.

>Or will people realize they are programming and discipline up?

Or will there be coding across disciplines, and attendant theories of literacies in context?

What I like about the OP is the consonance with literate practices, which has gone through similar generations of "our children don't know how to [...]" alongside of "our children will not need to [...] because of the machines."