alt Hacker NewsA non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.
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This hospital will learn some hard lessons. I hope their backup strategy is good. I'm surprised they can field software from an entity that isn't SOC2 & HIPAA certified.
As a cybersecurity IR professional as much as I hate to see this happen to a hospital this kind of thing is responsible for essentially tripling my income over the last 3 years.
Have you tried to talk him out of it, and have you considered blowing the whistle on him? He could kill people!
As a SWE that has only ever worked for an employer or on his own projects, this makes me wonder: how would someone even get such a contract? Did this person already have a consulting business? Do you just call up random hospitals and ask if you can demo an inventory management system for them? Did this person already know people at the hospital? I know technical folks that do independent consulting, but even with a vibecoded product, how is it that anyone can just get such a contract?
Wow. This is like every other gold rush. Millions will walk into the ice and snow, somehow not questioning that their ability to dig is not unique.
I'd really like to know how he won contracts, just in general. Did he have some connections. And he doesn't even know how to get it to run on a server by himself? There's millions of people that can do that, if he can win contracts why worry about vibe coding at all, just hire someone to do it. Winning contracts is the challenge in my view.
This is going to happen all over. Company I'm currently contracting with has gone AI everything (aka technical debt hell), and they're gonna suffer for it. I'm glad my consulting contract ends in 2 months. I don't want to be around for the crash
Don't help him. Let him figure it out by himself, else they (he and hospital) will never learn.
I hope you have quoted him a very very high hourly rate.
Heaven help us.
jfc lmao
What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.