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pydryyesterday at 8:06 AM1 replyview on HN

I wonder how much of this "simple but bespoke" stuff would be better served with some customized off the shelf software rather than a vibe coded tool.

There's not a lot of software where users dont really care if it goes wrong.


Replies

Quothlingyesterday at 9:22 AM

I doubt it would be better served as a customized off the shelf software. They certainly could have done it with our existing systems with SmartSheet, Microsoft Fabric and/or Power Apps with SharePoint for document storage.

From an enterprise perspective this becomes complicated for various reasons. RBAC is one area. In the perfect world you have a system to handle roles and rights to every system, something that you can give managers access to so they can maintain the access available to their employees, something linked with HR. In reality you have EntraID with a hieracy which is sort of automated by HR data, but not really, because sometimes HR puts everyone on the CEO level by mistake, and, if you trusted HR as authoritative that would've just broken all the EU laws. So you have all those Entra groups and you need IT Operations to maintain them and since you want to build it on job roles and not people you'll typically not be able to maintain them in the off the shelf system. Which means that you would have had to build a web portal for the plant managers manager where they could maintain a couple of Entra groups in a web interface. That or you'll have to setup an IT support flow where you add yet another system that IT has to maintain access for.

Then we get to the actual customization. Maybe you buy a custom API on top of your BC365 platform. Maybe your C-levels deciced that paying €50k a year to avoid outages on major updates isn't worth the cost. Then when things predictably and completely avoidable fail you're going to hav to deal with the literal shitstorm. You'd think that all the people being locked out of their jobs and the €150k cost of getting an immediate and prioritised update to the system would mean you'd start paying for that $50k service after this. You'd be wrong. Ok, to be fair, in this particular example it would be a different scenario. For a small system like this you'd find a cheap consultant house in your area and get them to build the customization for you. Only they would outsource it to some solo developer who will build it in a way that basically requires that specific person to alter it. Then when it breaks or needs to be customized futher a year down the line, that person is no longer a solo developer. So you reach out to another cheap consultant house and do it all over again, from scratch.

This doesn't even mention how poorly all those 300 off the shelf systems work together. I mean, I don't maintain a SDK delivering a way to use Apache-Arrow to write and read parquet files from our datalake in the same manner for fun. I do it because those 600 container apps which basically simply translate data from one system to another need it to be as slim as possible.

Am I jaded? Sure. But who isn't in enterprise IT?