A friend and I were discussing this the other day. Neither of us are programmers. We're both IT, but I'm more Sysadmin, while he's a Business Analyst/PM. While my major was CS, I never finished. His background is IE.

Lately, he got an idea to code a POS system for restaurants. He knows some restaurant owners who were telling him how expensive these systems could be, and how there's some other small local business that's started providing their own proprietary POS service that's cheaper than the big players. Yet this company is apparently making money hand over fist.

While he's dabbled in programming before, he doesn't have any foundational knowledge. So to create this POS, he's been vibe coding. It's impressive what he's been able to create in such little time. It's a simple web-based app. I mean, a POS should be simple to use. Regardless, it's a cool little thing.

As he was raving about how much he can do with LLMs and how good they are these days, I asked him, "Is it secure?" After all, it'd be dealing with money and credit cards and all that. Sure, his idea is to integrate with a payment processor like Square or Stripe, that handles the actual processing of credit cards. That makes total sense. But is his program knowingly or unknowingly storing that credit card information? Are the variable being properly scoped and such? Does he even know about that?

There are so many more questions to be asked, questions that I don't even know to ask, because I don't have fully foundational knowledge, either. But if one doesn't have that foundational knowledge at all, how can they be expected to ask anything, much less answer them?

He's having to read the generated code, parse it, and add his own code to connect and fix problems; I can't imagine the LLM has literally created an entire working program for him. So he does have to understand it at some level. But if he doesn't know what to look for, he's going to miss all the things that may work, but actually are problems. It's not enough that the program just works.

I agree that vibe coding can be super helpful. Like other's have said, it works for simple scripting, POCs/prototyping, or simple internal tools. I have a coworker who's vibe coding something akin to Uptime Kuma for our team. Cool, I get it. Vibe code away, my guy.

But a POS system? That's a whole different beast. I wouldn't be comfortable using my friend's system. Is this just a proof of concept or is this something that he would actually be willing to "ship?" I certainly hope not the latter. Though he didn't say it was just a POC. But again, he lacks that foundational knowledge. Who's to say he wouldn't try to find a restaurant to work with?

Honestly, I don't know how serious he is about this idea. But I hope our discussion gave him some additional things to think about if he is thinking seriously about this POS idea. He's an intelligent guy, but sometimes I think he thinks he's more adept at tech than he really is. And I think for people like him, vibe coding can greatly feed that notion.

At the end of the day, LLMs are just another tool. And like any tool, you have to know when and where to use it.