My friend who has never taken a programming class (or even touched an IDE before AFAIK) has now put a small app into production.
Complete frontend + backend + database.
Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.
Does that count as an example?
(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)
These kind of things (internal tools created out of band of normal engineering practices by non-engineers) were amazing back when I did pentesting because the security was always the last consideration. That got harder when SaaS became preferable to rolling your own stuff for everything. Guess things are gonna get fun again for red teams lol
The danger is not however that only that people write their own tools for calculations and capacity planning etc.
The danger is people make useful stuff that is very fine as long it is just an internal tool, but then someone add credentials to other systems so it can access and maybe even update stuff and it gets exposed to third parties etc and all of a sudden we have a major data breach going on.
Obviously it was not the same s since models that could write programs were not available 10 years ago.
And if you just mean your friend taught himself programming on his own, well that is actually very cool, I did too back in the 90ies and so did many others here.
My point is that it is now possible to vibe code a full application from frontend to backend today and still not be able to understand a line of TypeScript or anything else.
20 years ago we had cpanel where people without programming knowledge can instantly deploy their own apps. Many people got millionaire doing that, I'd say proportionally probably way more than the people vibecoding solutions. This is not as revolutionary as we thought.
Complete frontend + backend + database.
Yes, it is an internal app, but it works and everyone loves it.
Does that count as an example?
(Also I absolutely expect him to need help at some point, but so far it has taken his project from absolutely impossible to 3 weeks of work in between work, renovating his house and being a dad for the first time so I was very impressed.)