We put a coding agent in a while loop

There will be a a new kind of job for software engineers, sort of like a cross between working with legacy code and toxic site cleanup.

Like back in the day being brought in to “just fix” a amalgam of FoxPro-, Excel-, and Access-based ERP that “mostly works” and only “occasionally corrupts all our data” that ambitious sales people put together over last 5 years.

But worse - because “ambitious sales people” will no longer be constrained by sandboxes of Excel or Access - they will ship multi-cloud edge-deployed kubernetes micro-services wired with Kafka, and it will be harder to find someone to talk to understand what they were trying to do at the time.

A big part of the reason that people develop solutions in Excel is that they don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No business case, no scope, no plan, and most importantly no budget.

Unless a business allows any old employee to spin up cloud services on a whim we’re not going to see sales people spinning up containers and pipelines, AI or not.

So very true.

And then over time these Excel spreadsheets become a core system that runs stuff.

I used to live in fear of one of these business analyst folks overwriting a cell or sorting by just the column and not doing the rows at the same time.

Also VLOOKUP's are the devil.