> Elsewhere on HN right now is a post about a dermatologist vibecoding an app for skin stuff. I view the “need/use ai for coding” as an indictment against how complex software development has become.
There's a reason why, in the late 90s and early 2000s, people were able to jump out of non-technical careers into development using languages like ASP and ColdFusion. There were some shortcomings of the stacks of the day, but functionally, the ability to meet many business cases really hasn't changed since those days.
Not to mention Visual Basic.
... and Excel and Access. So much shadow IT got developed because Excel (+VBA, which is almost as powerful as regular VB6, including calls to the native win32 DLL API) is present everywhere, and Access is pretty widespread as well.
> shadow IT
I read somewhere that the number of Excel "programmers" is an order or magnitude larger than all professional programmers in all other languages put together.
Makes you wonder which is the "shadow IT"!
I got my start in professional software development by building an multi-user Access shadow-IT database application that made heavy use of VBA. It only worked because it had a couple of active users at any time, and I left that workplace with documentation consisting of a half-page of bullet points. I know for certain that it was still in usage four years after I left, though God know how long it kept operating in the end.
Notwithstanding that shadow IT is the bane of my existence these days, I sometimes need to be reminded of how far a motivated individual can come when they have access to adequate tools and information.