My larger enterprise world today AI adoption seems to have taken a turn for the worse.
Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose. And because they know my management freezes whenever there are whispers of "our CFO said so" they even paraded that reasoning - "our CFO "tested" Lovable and he is convinced and asking us to vibe code the app".
If that is not enough they ended with a nicely wrapped reasoning of "we need to try this to be sure that using vibe coded app can exist in enterprise finance with appropriate data security and maintainability".
And mind you this is a reasoning at a company with more than 20+ billion in revenue.
> Finance folks reached out asking if they could vibe code their own app using Copilot/Cursor/Claude for finance planning purpose.
Having worked with these finance apps (Hyperion, Axiom, Workday etc), they're very data heavy and getting good performance out of them requires real engineering, so much so that they come with their own spreadsheet software to handle the multi-dimensional multi-million-row datasets (along with many other requirements like auditability, version control, workflow, consolidation etc) that excel just can't handle with all its limitations.
On the other hand, there's the 'Let Them' theory [1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Let-Them-Theory-Life-Changing-Million...
Run for the hills. These sorts of businesses can get by with an old dos app running in an emulator to manage sales and inventory. They don’t care about maintainability or anything we care about. If it works it works and they will squeeze it to work as long as they possibly can. Which could very well be three decades or more.
What’s wrong with the finance team (vibe) coding a janky prototype for planning?
Because the next email is going to be "we demoed the app to our CEO and he loved it and he wants it in production". I have never seen the team back down from their ideas.
And also, I have been in similar sounding scenarios multiple times. They talk big when everything is going smoothly and nothing is on the line. The day shit hits the fan, they will furiously message me on Teams and insist that I support them in finding out issues. So far it has been about mostly about shitty design choices. This is at whole new level. They want to vibe code an app which will be used to plan and guide company's direction for the next year.
prototypes/mvp's often become the production version
And their spreadsheets don't?
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This seems to be the default path which is encouraged/suggested lately, only happy path until you acquire customers
I think it’s fairly normal at least in my career - rush to ship something, lots of “we’ll polish this later,” two years go by, get called into vp/cto/whoever’s office when the debt comes calling like “what the fuck why is this like this???” and I have to say “that ‘later’ we decided is now I guess”
The script I have fairly seen being played is where the one doing MVP gets rewarded and moves on with a promotion. The weight of completing and stabilizing the MVP falls on some one else who is not vocal enough in terms of influence. Ironically the flashy MVP does not includes monitoring, logging, security, edge-cases, CI-CD, DR, scaling which is why vibe coding is getting so popular and everyone seems to be under the impression that engineers are not needed anymore.
...and are often still in place when the "magic guy who built it" left long time ago...
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