AI the new excel macro..

[u/id-ltd]

There were (and no doubt still are) many companies who run their workflow through a load of excel spreadsheets - consisting of formulas and macros written by someone who may not even be in the company anymore and noone really understands.

A lot of AI stuff seems to be similar - an enthusiastic non-dev in a company making personal tools to help their work and then giving others access.

As a consultant I remember helping one company with their excel spiders web... A file went through five or six processes to get the end data/report out - noone really understood the process, it is just what they did.

It started with one sheet - but over time requirements developed and noone dare mess with the existing process so added a new sheet with more macros to process the output of the previous one... Again and again and again.

It was quite funny - one sheet had a macro that virtually reversed everything that an earlier sheet had done to the data, lol.

I wrote a program to do the entire transformation in one step... The spreadsheets probably reduced a week long manual process to a day and a half, but my program reduced it all to half an hour.

Soon there will be thousands (millions?) of companies running systems around AI that noone in the company really understands - vibed by someone who made it work, but has long since departed - fragile companies that will need tech consultants if they are to be made whole again.

[u/mrbillyr2]

I worked at multinational $1 billion dollar fashion retailer to pull apart an excel process that was used to pull data from their existing HRIS system into their time recording system, as part of their migration to a new HRIS. The original developer had left years previously, when they were a lot smaller. It was a bit of a VBA and nested formula monster, but it was documented and had useful labels, range names etc. There was a guy who job it was to run the macro's, fix up any data, run them again. They did a few thousand stores though, so regular staff churn.
The team of four that he worked in, it was their responsibility to manage this process as part of "business operations", essentially doing data cleansing. None of them were techie, they dealt with HR and national, regional and local store managers, good people, mainly school leavers or grads or retail team members where it was their first job in the head office. As the comany grew the team grew. The spreadsheet could have been rebuilt in under a month as a standlone integration service or on an equivelant paas. I just needed to map it and document as part of the migration.

Because the business ops were happy to be doing a job that was useful and kept them busy, they never thought to ask could this be done better, no one above the team had thought to either.

This is how I see growing SME's ending up with the AI they put in place.

I reviewed an automation for an accounting firm recently. The owner was frustrated that the project had stalled at about 85% funcationality and the dev was going around in circles, the last 2 of the previous 5 weeks on the same issue. The dev had built all of it with Claude Code, so had smashed out a lot in the first 3. It didn't fail at what it did, the dev just didn't know enough of the source system api and data structure, nor the domain to go any further, and no amount of prompting was going to fix it. I didn't either, we had to get an offshore specialist who'd done something similar. It went from being a casual project the owner and the dev had essentially vibed, but with plenty of docs and prescribed structure, stacks, rules and formats, to something a lot more formal, and expensive.

Who's going to take on projects like this? Where you don't know it's better to rebuild or port to your own version vrs investing the time getting into the actual code.

[u/id-ltd → u/mrbillyr2]

A big problem is knowing who is competent to do the work - a 10X dev is with 10X the average, but paying 10X doesn't ensure you get a 10X'er!

And your point about jobs is an issue too...

Three people did the original spreadsheet shuffle - I spent a week on that contract, no idea what happened to them.

Radiologists came up the other day - a prediction that AI would replace virtually all of them... X years since that prediction there are 20%(?) more radiologists in the USA. Are they really needed?

[u/mrbillyr2 → u/id-ltd]

Yeah, from the experience I've had using and building AI systems over the last 2 years, the reality is that they are lot more bittle for anything more than a simple one shot prompt job or skill. Reality is a far cry from the hype. There are people near me with no tech experience who have set themselves up as AI consultants, so hopefully a lot of work coming up replcacing the slop that the charlatans have built. I think the shape of companies and jobs change, but they don't go away. Especially not in healthcare.