Yesterday I was blown away when my colleague shared an app that he vibe-coded, which has a beautiful web interface that has a menu of Cisco device configuration as comprehensive as the full schema provided by Cisco. As you click on each of the configurations, input forms will show up for you to enter configuration just like filling up a form. Then as you fill up the form, you can see the configuration being generated on-the-fly in YAML on the right panel.
Before that, the network automation workflow would be using Excel as the input platform since this is the typical network engineer method. Then using scripts to convert from Excel to YAML (Cisco Network-as-Code framework). This will require a lot of development work to make the Excel template and scripts work correctly.
Now with this one-shot app, we can eliminate working on Excel and scripts.
Sure I’ve built a one-shot app to help me analyze all my credit card statements and generate a beautiful visualization, but it just stops there. I never tried to build another “app”.
This is like a wake-up call to me that I need to rethink how I would approach a problem in the future. Think about how I can use AI to build an app to solve my problem.
Of course now the app built by AI is not enterprise grade. But think about this: just a few years back the video generated by AI looked crap. But now, I can’t even differentiate between what’s real and AI-generated.
Now, AI can generate high-quality utility apps for personal use. Give it a few more years, we shall see.