Help, my dentist started coding! | Thomas Witt: Tech Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

Help, my dentist started coding!

tech

There is a recurring pattern in enterprise software history: technologies that initially promised dramatic productivity gains by hiding complexity eventually created large applications that became difficult or impossible to maintain.

So when my dentist celebrates on LinkedIn that Fable 5 got re-enabled and can’t wait to burn tokens again, I have to ask myself: is this a warning of how much broken software we will have to debug over the next decade? History is repeating itself here.

There is an old saying: if you give a fool a faster tool, all you get is a faster fool.

I see this pattern all the time. It’s not just the dentist who wants to get rid of his old patient management software. It’s CEOs of well-funded late-stage startups and private equity fund managers who suddenly decide that building a CRM is their core business. Marketing agencies start building iOS apps.

The main problem here is IMHO the false advertising by the frontier model providers. The perceived message is: “Everyone can code”.

Sure, if you have decades of experience in building software, Claude Code and Codex are massively powerful tools which can give you that 10x boost. I can confirm this for myself in my daily work.

But after years at the forefront of AI development, trying basically every new tool and model and testing them as thoroughly as possible, my personal conclusion is: we are not there.

Yes, AI can easily build over 90% of your code. That’s exactly what we are doing at Vendis.ai while building our AI-first CRM. BUT: the amount of internal tooling needed to steer these models in the right direction (Rules, Subagents, Skills, Configuration, Orchestration, etc.), plus the amount of manual review required to stop the coding agent from producing simply terrible software, is still remarkable. And that’s despite using a very well-organized, opinionated framework: Ruby on Rails. Every developer at Vendis has 25+ years of coding experience, and right now, that experience is simply not replaceable.

Will we get there at some point, through AGI or simply incrementally improved models? Very likely. As usual, people tend to overestimate the short-term effects of technology and underestimate the long-term effects.

The problem isn’t just the terribly unmaintainable, untested code (my prediction: software agencies and service providers will have a blast cleaning up this mess over the next years). It’s also security. Under EU law at least, you have to report data breaches and hacking attacks to the authorities. Let’s see what happens when these builders have to do that for the first time, because some Russian or North Korea ransomware group knew better how to turn frontier models into money.

At least it’s maybe just a question of time when your patient records will be<br>available on the internet, because access controls have been only implemented<br>client-side (FIFA, anyone?)

The even bigger problem is Day 2: operations. Ask these people how they actually run their software, and they just follow whatever Claude tells them. “Here is your deployment to Vercel.” Done.

Obviously, this results in a nightmare, from simple things like database backups all the way to security bugs. If you are lucky, Claude MIGHT tell you when to upgrade that CVE’d npm package. Or not. Or there is a privilege escalation hiding in the code. Or there are simply no tests.

Can a frontier model find these issues? Likely. But if you don’t ask the right questions, it won’t.

Interestingly, all of this reminds me of how I started my life in software, with my first company, founded in the late 90s, doing B2B software. Every potential customer we visited had proprietary Lotus Notes apps. Lotus Notes was the n8n/Lovable of the 80s and 90s. Most people today won’t remember, but I do, vividly. Lotus Notes was revolutionary. It combined databases, forms, workflows, replication, and email in one product. Business users could build applications with surprisingly little programming. It was a low-code dream that slowly but surely turned into an IT nightmare.

Those NSF databases were completely proprietary and mixed Formula language, LotusScript, and Java. Business logic often lived inside forms. Nothing was tested. There was very little architectural separation. And developers frequently left without documentation.

Employees with almost no coding experience created these apps, and the apps became centerpieces of the business. But they were usually totally unmaintainable, had a completely proprietary data model, were compatible only with themselves, and were very, very hard to modernize. Many Fortune 500 companies still run Notes applications written 20 to 30 years ago because replacing them is too risky.

While companies realized their legacy problem and paid literally millions of dollars to get rid of that Lotus Notes nonsense, the next hail-mary...