From their profile, this person makes a living selling AI programming products, by the way. Who could have guessed. There's a pattern to be noticed, even.
I also have repeatedly experienced the phenomenon of nontechnical people having built custom software to run their businesses. A lawyer friend was first, sending me a link to his GitHub(!), where he has built a custom client intake/practice-management application to work as the firm works. He's not the only non-technical lawyer I know who has shared vibe coded apps with me.
I personally build many, many single-use apps than I ever would have before. Gnarly debugging sessions can be greatly simplified by inserting a custom piece of disposable tooling/etc. I am not a Mac programmer, but I now have custom Mac apps to solve problems that only I want solved. Do these count?
Honestly, I would be a little surprised if anyone posting on HN did not have some personal exposure to the explosion of apps.
I personally have been building a bunch of little personal apps for my home that aren't worth the effort of sharing - like a customized dashboard of the Trimet buses closest to my house. The cost to build the initial good-enough version was literally 5 minutes plus another 10 to test and deploy.
And like Excel, software people are gonna end up complaining about the quality and having to maintain these applications.
- lobby the IT department for at least a quarter, then wait at least one quarter, and at the end you get a buggy implementation of your idea that doesn't quite work
- or: spend a weekend hacking together a quick and ugly, buggy spreadsheet prototype of your idea that doesn't quite work.
I mean, based on my own experience with AI tools, this feels like the standard output.
Nowadays people (allegedly) buy a Mac Mini to run 'claw'. Back in the day, they bought a mac to run a spreadsheet.