Half of the current startups could be done with a speadsheet and yet they earn money.

The number of businesses and business departments that run on spreadsheets and earn money is almost mind-boggling.

It works until it doesn’t. The failure mode can be that the spreadsheet wizard leaves and no one understands their macros, the data grows 10x and emailing spreadsheets back and forth becomes too error prone, or any other of the well-known ways that this falls apart.

Those of us in software always cringe and want to use a database.

“Vibe-coded apps are the new spreadsheet.” Seems about right, and the problems will be similar.

Edit: This comes across as more negative than I wanted. I think spreadsheet-driven businesses are pretty amazing, and it's a testament to the tool how far they can get. I pretty much feel that way about bespoke vibe-coded apps. I'd feel even better about it if the rhetoric wasn't mixed in with claiming software as a career is over or that no one will have jobs anymore.

Institutional knowledge is just valued at $0.

I want that to be true because it means I'll still have a job, but vibe coded apps by non-developers are still backed by git (as far as I've seen), addressing at least one issue with spreadsheets, and are hosted on Vercel, and backed by Supabase, so there's no sending files back and forth and the database (PostgreSQL) has backups and is able to scale somewhat. What are the other well-known ways that spreadsheets fall apart? If the person leaves, all the next person has to do when something breaks is to the LLM the problem and ask it to fix it. You couldn't do that with a spreadsheet.

UI/UX is important.