“We'll just build it ourselves.” Anyone who runs a company knows that sentence. It used to end in an Excel list. Today an AI builds an app with a customer database over a weekend, and it looks great.
With an app like that, you're never alone at work. In May 2026 a security firm searched apps made with AI app builders: 1 in 76 exposed sensitive data on the open web. Anyone who wanted to could read along. Including the people who really shouldn't: strangers, competitors, scammers who make their money with names and email addresses.
I'm building software with AI myself right now, an entire office suite, and wrote about it on LinkedIn. Under the post, Sergey Goncharenko, a program manager in enterprise IT, joined the discussion. He wrote explicitly as a private person, and that's how I quote him. His reply was the best counterargument to my experiment I've received so far.
“Slowly but steadily you will hire similar staff which is currently maintaining Office.”
Sergey Goncharenko, on LinkedIn
This post takes his arguments apart one by one. On most of them he's right. On one he's off, and that's exactly where it gets interesting.
The short answer
- Many AI apps are Excel lists that moved house. The list used to sit as a file on the company network. Now it sits in a database on the internet. Whether anyone reads along depends on a single setting.
- The AI isn't the problem. It builds what the app builders tell it to: a central database. That database is the target.
- Balane Office doesn't have one. Files stay on your device, even though the whole office suite was built with AI.
- Sergey is right on what matters most. AI can't maintain, can't be liable and can't sign off. That's why Balane Office is an experiment, not a product.
The Excel list becomes an app
“Excel is dead. Build yourself an app.” That's the promise of vibe coding: you describe to an AI what you want, and it builds it. Platforms like Lovable, Replit or Base44 turn that into a product. One sentence in, one app out, with login, database and its own address on the web.
In May 2026 the Israeli security firm RedAccess looked at what comes out of this. It found 380,000 publicly reachable apps and databases from Lovable, Replit, Base44 and Netlify. Around 5,000 of them contained sensitive data, roughly 1 in 76. Axios and Wired verified some of the cases.
What was inside reads like a look into other people's Excel files. Which ships are expected in which port and when. A list of ongoing clinical trials. Customer service chat logs. Financial figures from a bank. Medical reports from hospitals.
A list like that used to sit as a file on the company network. Anyone who wanted to read it had to get in first. Today it sits in a database on the internet, reachable around the clock.
How exposed are AI apps really?
A second count comes from UpGuard, another security firm. In October 2026 it examined around 300,000 websites that use Supabase, an online database that according to UpGuard is close to the default for vibe-coded apps. On 16,326 of them anyone could read tables, and more than half contained signs of personal data.*
UpGuard, October 2026; RedAccess, May 2026. The two studies count different things and can't be added up. * See the note at the end.
The cause is mundane. To keep strangers out of other people's records, every table needs a rule saying who may see what. When a person creates the table in the dashboard, that rule is switched on. When an AI agent creates it through the API, it isn't. And UpGuard didn't check its 300,000 websites by hand, it did so automatically. What researchers can do, attackers can do too.
The AI isn't the problem
You could conclude: hands off AI. That would be the wrong conclusion.
In all these cases the AI built what it was told to, or what the platform nudged it towards: an app with a central database on the web. That's how web software has been built for twenty years. The only new thing is that anyone can now do it, overnight, without knowing that this one rule exists.
Whoever uses AI to turn an Excel list into a web app swaps a file on the company network for a database on the internet that anyone can read if a single rule is missing.
Why Balane Office has no database
I'm building Balane Office the other way round from the start. Spreadsheets, documents and presentations are files on your device, just like an Excel file. There's no account and no server where I collect anything. Where AI helps, the text goes directly to the provider you chose, with your own key.
What you don't collect, you can't lose.
That doesn't make everything secure. A lost laptop is still a lost laptop, and anyone using AI sends text to a provider. But an open database can't happen in Balane Office, because there's no place where it could sit.
So much for my side. Now Sergey's.
Sergey's objections, examined one by one
I've split his comments into six points. On the left is his argument, next to it what my experiment shows. On narrow screens the check follows directly below the argument.
1. The pace of maintenance
“If you try to create all of the features (and you will need them if you want to continue to interact with other people using your files or working with you) using AI, it will get ugly very fast, you won't be able to maintain pace of security patching, compliance controls, broken features, hacked dependencies, changes, all of that yourself, alone.”
On the objection “We can't maintain it”, my post only said: “True. For now.” That's exactly where Sergey hooked in. It's his strongest point, and it lands. Software is never finished. Every week something it depends on changes.
2. Hacked dependencies
Sergey lists “hacked dependencies” in passing. Behind it lies one of the industry's nastiest risks: third-party code that nobody picked sits inside every program. If one of those building blocks is taken over or tampered with, everyone using it is hit.
3. Trust and attacks
“People working with your office need to trust nothing bad is embedded in a macro. And I am not talking even about hackers now, nowadays it could be AI agentic swarms.”
Microsoft Office, he writes, is basically a chain of trust: you and your partners trust Microsoft with security and compliance. Anyone who builds their own app has to convince all their partners to trust it too.
4. A company larger than Microsoft
“In order to build something as complex and uniformly used as Office, you would need to create a company larger than Microsoft, pretty much like trying to see beyond Planck scale requires blackhole-worth of power.”
The best image of the whole discussion.
5. Two companies, one market
“You need to have one company which is competing in some business which in some spare moments vibe-coding part of their software stack. And another company which is using off-the-shelf stack and also competing in same space. So time + tokens spent, vs SaaS subscription spent, who wins?”
And on top of that: anyone who thinks they can build an office suite on the side will be outpaced by whoever puts their time into their actual business.
6. Compliance is attached to people
“Compliance attached to people for now, so I think it is more complex than security, we will probably see security more or less solved in upcoming years, but then again, at what price?”
He's very skeptical, he writes, that AI can work through all required regulations, provide proof to customers and keep that up with every new rule.
At a glance
| Sergey's point | My verdict | Evidence from the experiment |
|---|---|---|
| Pace of maintenance | right | one update broke the iPhone build, old version pinned |
| Hacked dependencies | half right | 16 picked, around 600 pulled in; licence check open |
| Trust and attacks | right | open databases are found automatically; without a database there's nothing to find |
| Larger than Microsoft | I see it differently | everyday features built in days; compatibility remains the wall |
| Two companies, one market | right, for today | experiment, not a product |
| Compliance attached to people | right | GDPR and Cyber Resilience Act require a person |
Where I disagree
I agree with Sergey on almost everything. I have to disagree at one point, and it's the decisive one: he calculates as if every self-built office suite had to be built like Microsoft 365. With servers, accounts, central data storage, an attack surface the size of a data centre.
That's exactly what it doesn't have to be. A large part of the work he lists only exists because of the central database: securing it, monitoring it, defending it against swarms, notifying thousands of people after every leak. If you don't collect other people's data, a large part of that work never arises.
That doesn't solve everything. Maintenance, licences and compatibility remain. But it's a different yardstick than “a company larger than Microsoft”.
The objection: Excel files aren't secure either
The obvious objection to my file-based approach: Excel files travel the world as attachments, end up in the wrong folders and on USB sticks. That isn't secure either.
True. But then a leak affects one file, not a database that anyone on the internet can query, around the clock, automatically.
The second objection is more serious: no central database, no collaboration. I'm working on that right now. Balane Office is getting a team chat and shared document editing where devices talk to each other directly, end-to-end encrypted. Whether that holds up in a real team's daily work is still open. That'll be its own episode.
What follows
BEFORE YOU TURN AN EXCEL LIST INTO AN AI APP
- Does this list really need a database on the internet? Often a file is enough.
- If yes: who may see which data, and has anyone tried it as a stranger?
- Who raises the alarm when something breaks? A name, not a department.
At the end Sergey wrote something that stayed with me longer than all the numbers. Maybe the slow pace at which rules and processes adapt to AI isn't a flaw, but good for us as humans. I think he's right. We often build what's possible, not what's needed. A bit of friction is then not a bug, but a feature.
And one question from our discussion remains open. Denmark, Schleswig-Holstein and others are currently moving away from software from outside the EU. What happens when people who aren't into tech get a spreadsheet that looks like Excel but calculates differently? Is Europe building an expensive copy of its software, or will it pay off?
I don't know yet. I keep building and write down what works and what doesn't. Next up: the team chat without a server, and spreadsheets that have to calculate correctly. You can try Balane Office at balane.online, and if you want to see where it goes, follow me on LinkedIn.
Which Excel list in your company has already become an AI app, and do you know who's reading along?
* The 16,326 are Supabase databases with publicly readable tables, counted by UpGuard across around 300,000 websites (published 14 October 2026). According to UpGuard, Supabase is close to the default database for vibe-coded apps. UpGuard didn't count how many of the 16,326 were demonstrably built with AI, and whether strangers actually accessed the data is not established. Clearly attributable to AI app builders are the around 5,000 apps from the RedAccess study.
Related
- Is AI eating its own makers? I rebuilt Office
- Why doesn't a company just build its own Office?
- The Certificate Was Valid
Sources
- Sergey Goncharenko, comments under my LinkedIn post, October 2026, personal opinion, quoted with his permission
- VentureBeat: 5,000 vibe-coded apps just proved shadow AI is the new S3 bucket crisis, 8 May 2026, on the RedAccess study; verified by Axios and Wired
- UpGuard, Greg Pollock: Everything, Everywhere: Systemic Data Exposure in Supabase Apps, 14 October 2026
- Jones Day: EU Cyber Resilience Act: 24-Hour Reporting Duties Start September 11, 2026, July 2026
- Regulation (EU) 2024/2847 (Cyber Resilience Act), EUR-Lex
- Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR), EUR-Lex, Art. 33 (notification within 72 hours)
- Own count: dependencies in the networking part of Balane Dialog (Cargo.lock and pubspec.lock), 18 October 2026; findings in
docs/product/erkundung.mdin the Balane Office repository