One of the riskier bets my team is currently making is that this is exactly what is needed, and nearly nothing more.
We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all the guidance necessary to keep the agent between the lines. Coupled with review bots and evolving architecture guidance etc. Then the business partner develops and supports it from there.
For low stakes CRUD, I think it’s a reasonable middle ground. There truly is a lot of value in letting an expert user fine tune UX; and we’re only doing this with people who are already good at defining requirements and have the kind of “systems” thinking that makes them valuable analyst resources to the tech team already. Early results are encouraging but it’s way too early to draw conclusions.
Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks.
Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks
This, I think, is the LLM/vibe coded app’s current place to shine.
Most internal systems don’t need massive concurrency or redundancy. It’s a webapp that reduces coordination cost between 20ish people. That’s something you can typically vibe code and deploy for ten bucks a month, and create real value.
The problem is that everyone has a different opinion. If you let a single user drive the design then that single user might love it, but everyone else will hate it.
Bespoke designs are often really terrible. Have you ever shopped for a house?
You know immediately when the previous owner had their stupid whims indulged by contractors with dollar-signs in their eyes. The house is ugly, non-functional and is not going to get the sellers price.
The next owner will undo nearly all of the work, and the contractor will cash in on both ends.
As engineers, we like to think we're the contractor in this scenario. But it's actually just an LLM.
I've been in a similar situation as the GP. 15 years ago my first job after college was at a large Fortune 500 building LOB apps. The company was full of departments that were run entirely out of a massive Excel spreadsheet (hundreds of MB or more), or better yet a totally custom thing built on Access97 and VB made by a guy who retired 10 years ago. More than a few of the people in these departments had been in the same job for 20+ years and literally done the job the same way the whole time. Our mandate was not to modernize their business processes or make them friendly to automation, it was literally to indulge their stupid whims. But at least at the end they would be on an app where IT had access to the source code, could ensure databases were backed up, etc.
Sure, but these are small departmental apps, 20 users or less in most cases. It’s not like everyone is using every app. The alternatives at this scale are far worse.
I know you didn't intend this, but a job where your main function is telling a machine how to copy someone else's half-baked CRUD sounds absolutely soul-sucking.
Is CRUD low stakes? Even if all you do with the employee database is read and write employees, losing it or corrupting it is disastrous, potentially business-ending.
Some of it is, certainly, and those are the ones we’re supporting this way. I’m not talking about systems of record - more like custom project and task coordination systems that would alternatively exist in spreadsheets, in Monday.com or wedged into some larger system that is a poor fit and functions largely through side channels.
Have you actually used them ? They are really good now if you configure them correctly. Code Rabbit catches more bugs than anyone in our main platform - mostly because it gets the first crack but that is still significant time and churn savings. Very low rate of false positives and almost always reasonable questions when they are.
We have LOB prototypes vibe coded by enthusiastic domain experts that we are supporting in a “port and release” fashion. A senior engineer takes the prototype and uses Claude code to generate a reasonable design, do an initial rough port (~80% functional, 100% auth & audit logging) and (hopefully) all the guidance necessary to keep the agent between the lines. Coupled with review bots and evolving architecture guidance etc. Then the business partner develops and supports it from there.
For low stakes CRUD, I think it’s a reasonable middle ground. There truly is a lot of value in letting an expert user fine tune UX; and we’re only doing this with people who are already good at defining requirements and have the kind of “systems” thinking that makes them valuable analyst resources to the tech team already. Early results are encouraging but it’s way too early to draw conclusions.
Personally I hate how badly internal users are served by the majority of their systems and am willing to take some calculated long-term governance risks.