5 ms·

A lot of these companies are not small monthly fees. And if you’ve ever worked with them, you’ll know that many of the tools they sell are an exact match for al

A lot of these companies are not small monthly fees. And if you’ve ever worked with them, you’ll know that many of the tools they sell are an exact match for almost nobody’s needs. So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool that they have to hammer into a circle hole. They do it because the alternative is worse. AI coding does not allow you to build anything even mildly complex with no programmers yet. But it does reduced by an order of magnitude the amount of money you need to spend on programming a solution that would work better. Another thing AI enables is significantly lower switching costs. A friend of mine owned an in person and online retailer that was early to the game, having come online in the late 90s. I remember asking him, sometime around 2010, when his Store had become very difficult to use, why he didn’t switch to a more modern selling platform, and the answer was that it would have taken him years to get his inventory moved from one system to another. Modern AI probably could’ve done almost all of the work for him. I can’t even imagine what would happen if somebody like Ford wanted to get off of their SAP or Oracle solution. A lot of these products don’t withhold access to your data but they also won’t provide it to you in any format that could be used without a ton of work that until recently would’ve required a large number of man hours

wtp1saac 9mo ago
If it is not a small fee, I do wonder - is there still advantage to having a provider which one may take out a lawsuit against if something goes wrong? To what extent might liability and security vetting by scaled usage still hedge against AI, in your view?
- thephyber 8mo ago
  It’s generally a tradeoff decision between comparative advantage of a vendor versus {price cost and contracting cost}. Contracting my cost is the difference in costs for a contract across companies versus a purely internal project. This could involve the lawyers on both sides, the time taken to negotiate which party is responsible for what deliverable / risk, the cost to enforce the contract, the time taken for negotiations/ iterations, etc. One efficient company doing it internally is obviously efficient. Two inefficient companies negotiating a contract is obviously inefficient. The interesting questions are the other 2 quadrants, where the answer may change between the LLM case and non-LLM case.
- mattmaroon 8mo ago
  Well in that case the provider is likely paying for insurance and charging you a mark up, so you could likely just buy the insurance and save the markup anyway.
paulpauper 9mo ago
Modern AI probably could’ve done almost all of the work for him. no way. We're not talking a standalone AI created program for a single end-user, but entire integrated e-commerce enterprise system that needs to work at scale and volume. Way harder.
- forgetfreeman 9mo ago
  I also have pretty hefty skepticism that AI is going to magically account for the kinds of weird-ass edge cases that one encounters during a large data migration.
  - FireBeyond 9mo ago
    I was interviewing with a company that has done ETL migration, interop and management tools for the healthcare space, and is just dipping their toes in the "Could AI do this for us or help us?" Their initial answer/efforts seem to be a qualified but very qualified "Possibly" (hah). They talked of pattern matching and recognition being a very strong point, but yeah, the edge cases tripping things up, whether corrupt data or something very obscure. Somewhat like the study of MRIs and CTs of people who had no cancer diagnosis but would later go on to develop cancer (i.e. they were sick enough that imaging and testing was being ordered but there were no/insufficient markers for a radiologist/oncologist to make the diagnosis, but in short order they did develop those markers). AI was very good at analyzing the data set and with high accuracy saying "this person likely went on to have cancer", but couldn't tell you why or what it found.
  - fragmede 9mo ago
    It's not that AI is magically going to do it, it's that the human running the migration now has better tools to generate code that does account for those one-off edge cases.
  - charcircuit 9mo ago
    Just like coding the AI can reach out to a human for clarification on what to do.
datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
Our company just went through an ERP transition and AI of all kinds was 0% helpful for the same reason it’s difficult for humans to execute: little to no documentation and data model mismatches.
- dehugger 9mo ago
  surprising considering you just listed two primary use cases (exploring codebases/data models + creating documentation)
  - gmueckl 9mo ago
    I don't find this surprising. Code and data models encode the results of accumulated business decisions, but nothing about the decision making process or rationale. Most of the time, this information is stored only in people's heads, so any automated tool is necessary blind.
    - phatfish 9mo ago
      This captures succinctly the one of the key issues with (current) AI actually solving real problems outside of small "sandboxes" where it has all the information. When an AI can email/message all the key people that have the institutional knowledge, ask them the right discovery questions (probably in a few rounds and working out which bits are human "hallucinations" that don't make sense). Collect that information and use it to create a solution. Then human jobs are in real trouble. Until that AI is just a productivity boost for us.
      - datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
        The AI will also have to be trained to be diplomatic and maybe even cunning, because, as I can personally attest, answering questions from an AI is an extremely grating and disillusioning experience. There are plenty of workers who refuse to answer questions from a human until it’s escalated far enough up the chain to affect their paycheck / reputation. I’m sure that the intelligence is artificial will only multiply the disdain / noncompliance. But then maybe there will be strategies for masking from where requests are coming, like a system that anonymizes all requests for information. Even so, I feel like there would still be a way that people would ping / walk up to their colleague in meatspace and say “hey that request came from me, thanks!”
solomatov 9mo ago
>But it does reduced by an order of magnitude the amount of money you need to spend on programming a solution that would work better Could you share any data on this? Are there any case studies you could reference or at least personal experience? One order of magnitude is 10x improvement in cost, right?
- ManuelKiessling 9mo ago
  I‘m not sure it’s a perfect example, but at least it’s a very realistic example from a company that really doesn’t have time and energy for hype or fluff: We are currently sunsetting our use of Webflow for content management and hosting, and are replacing it with our own solution which Cursor & Claude Opus helped us build in around 10 days: https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp
  - solomatov 9mo ago
    Thanks for the link. So, basically you made a replacement for webflow for your use case in 10 days, right?
    - ManuelKiessling 8mo ago
      That's fair to say, yes, with the important caveat that it isn't a 1:1 replacement of Webflow, which is exactly the point.
  - iamacyborg 9mo ago
    I’m not sure the world needed yet another CMS
    - danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
      It doesn't. The person is saying they built just the functionality they needed. Probably 25% of a CMS. That's the point.
stefan_ 9mo ago
Oh, but that doesn't matter. SaaS tools aren't bought by the people that have to use them. Entire groups in big companies (HR & co) are delegating the majority of their job to SaaS and all failures are blamed on the people who have to interact with them while they are entirely ancillary to their job.
WarmWash 9mo ago
I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones. It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion. There is only one program that offers this ability, but you need to pay for the entire software suite, and the process is painfully convoluted anyway. We went from doing maybe 2-3 files a day to do doing 2-3 files an hour. I have repeated ad-nausea that the magic of LLMs is the ability to built the exact tool you need for the exact job you are doing. No need for the expensive and complex 750k LOC full tool shed software suite.
- magicalist 9mo ago
  > It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion. is this like a meta-joke? > I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones. The funny thing about examples like this is that they mostly show how dumb and inefficient the market is with many things. This has been possible for a long time with, you know, people, just a little more expensive than a Claude subscription, but would have paid for itself many times over through the years.
  - mwigdahl 9mo ago
    It's not just a joke, it's a meta-joke! To address the substance of your comment, it's probably an opportunity cost thing. Programmers on staff were likely engaged in what was at least perceived as higher value work, and replacing the $250/mo subscription didn't clear the bar for cost/benefit. Now with Claude, it's easy to make a quick and dirty tool to do this without derailing other efforts, so it gets done.
    - WarmWash 8mo ago
      We have no programers on staff, we are not a tech company. I know we are in a bubble here, but AI has definitely made its way out of silicon valley.
dkarl 9mo ago
I worked on a product that had to integrate with Salesforce because virtually all of our customers used it. It must have been a terrible match for their domain, because they had all integrated differently, and all the integrations were bad. There was virtually no consistency from one customer to next in how they used the Salesforce data model. Considering all of these customers were in the same industry and had 90% overlapping data models, I gave up trying to imagine how any of them benefited from it. Each one must have had to pay separately for bespoke integrations to third-party tools (as they did with us) because there was no commonality from one to the next. One thing that's interesting is that their original Salesforce implementations were so badly done that I could imagine them being done with an LLM. The evergreen stream of work that requires human precision (so far, anyway) is all of the integration work that comes afterwards.
robocat 9mo ago
> So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool [SaaS] that they have to hammer into a circle hole. You are assuming that corporations have the capability to design the software they need. There are many benefits to SaaS software, and some significant costs (e.g. integration). One major benefit of SaaS is domain knowledge and most people underestimate the complexity of even well known domains (e.g. accounts). Companies also underestimate the difficulty of aligning diverging political needs within the business, and they underestimate the expense of distraction on a non-core area that there is no business advantage to becoming competent at. As a vendor sometimes our job was simply to be the least worst solution. At least that's what I saw.
- danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
  this is true in many cases and not in many cases. Another true one is payments - it's complex AF and and no one will sit down and vibe code it. A CRM? Easy in many cases. Some workflow tool? Easy, they know the exact workflow. So, sure, some products will go the way of the dodo and some will not.
  - nasmorn 8mo ago
    Only the still meek vibe code payments, the truly brave simply install the Stripe MCP directly in their on site chat window
    - danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
      this is hilarious
jayd16 9mo ago
Why waste your time on something that isn't your core business when, presumably, the SAASes of the world will use the new tech and lower prices as well?
- danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
  In most cases they can't. The cost they face is sales and marketing. Acquiring a customer costs money. Churn happens.

wtp1saac 9mo ago

If it is not a small fee, I do wonder - is there still advantage to having a provider which one may take out a lawsuit against if something goes wrong? To what extent might liability and security vetting by scaled usage still hedge against AI, in your view?

thephyber 8mo ago
It’s generally a tradeoff decision between comparative advantage of a vendor versus {price cost and contracting cost}. Contracting my cost is the difference in costs for a contract across companies versus a purely internal project. This could involve the lawyers on both sides, the time taken to negotiate which party is responsible for what deliverable / risk, the cost to enforce the contract, the time taken for negotiations/ iterations, etc. One efficient company doing it internally is obviously efficient. Two inefficient companies negotiating a contract is obviously inefficient. The interesting questions are the other 2 quadrants, where the answer may change between the LLM case and non-LLM case.
mattmaroon 8mo ago
Well in that case the provider is likely paying for insurance and charging you a mark up, so you could likely just buy the insurance and save the markup anyway.

paulpauper 9mo ago

Modern AI probably could’ve done almost all of the work for him. no way. We're not talking a standalone AI created program for a single end-user, but entire integrated e-commerce enterprise system that needs to work at scale and volume. Way harder.

forgetfreeman 9mo ago
I also have pretty hefty skepticism that AI is going to magically account for the kinds of weird-ass edge cases that one encounters during a large data migration.
- FireBeyond 9mo ago
  I was interviewing with a company that has done ETL migration, interop and management tools for the healthcare space, and is just dipping their toes in the "Could AI do this for us or help us?" Their initial answer/efforts seem to be a qualified but very qualified "Possibly" (hah). They talked of pattern matching and recognition being a very strong point, but yeah, the edge cases tripping things up, whether corrupt data or something very obscure. Somewhat like the study of MRIs and CTs of people who had no cancer diagnosis but would later go on to develop cancer (i.e. they were sick enough that imaging and testing was being ordered but there were no/insufficient markers for a radiologist/oncologist to make the diagnosis, but in short order they did develop those markers). AI was very good at analyzing the data set and with high accuracy saying "this person likely went on to have cancer", but couldn't tell you why or what it found.
- fragmede 9mo ago
  It's not that AI is magically going to do it, it's that the human running the migration now has better tools to generate code that does account for those one-off edge cases.
- charcircuit 9mo ago
  Just like coding the AI can reach out to a human for clarification on what to do.

datsci_est_2015 9mo ago

Our company just went through an ERP transition and AI of all kinds was 0% helpful for the same reason it’s difficult for humans to execute: little to no documentation and data model mismatches.

dehugger 9mo ago
surprising considering you just listed two primary use cases (exploring codebases/data models + creating documentation)
- gmueckl 9mo ago
  I don't find this surprising. Code and data models encode the results of accumulated business decisions, but nothing about the decision making process or rationale. Most of the time, this information is stored only in people's heads, so any automated tool is necessary blind.
  - phatfish 9mo ago
    This captures succinctly the one of the key issues with (current) AI actually solving real problems outside of small "sandboxes" where it has all the information. When an AI can email/message all the key people that have the institutional knowledge, ask them the right discovery questions (probably in a few rounds and working out which bits are human "hallucinations" that don't make sense). Collect that information and use it to create a solution. Then human jobs are in real trouble. Until that AI is just a productivity boost for us.
    - datsci_est_2015 9mo ago
      The AI will also have to be trained to be diplomatic and maybe even cunning, because, as I can personally attest, answering questions from an AI is an extremely grating and disillusioning experience. There are plenty of workers who refuse to answer questions from a human until it’s escalated far enough up the chain to affect their paycheck / reputation. I’m sure that the intelligence is artificial will only multiply the disdain / noncompliance. But then maybe there will be strategies for masking from where requests are coming, like a system that anonymizes all requests for information. Even so, I feel like there would still be a way that people would ping / walk up to their colleague in meatspace and say “hey that request came from me, thanks!”

solomatov 9mo ago

>But it does reduced by an order of magnitude the amount of money you need to spend on programming a solution that would work better Could you share any data on this? Are there any case studies you could reference or at least personal experience? One order of magnitude is 10x improvement in cost, right?

ManuelKiessling 9mo ago
I‘m not sure it’s a perfect example, but at least it’s a very realistic example from a company that really doesn’t have time and energy for hype or fluff: We are currently sunsetting our use of Webflow for content management and hosting, and are replacing it with our own solution which Cursor & Claude Opus helped us build in around 10 days: https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp
- solomatov 9mo ago
  Thanks for the link. So, basically you made a replacement for webflow for your use case in 10 days, right?
  - ManuelKiessling 8mo ago
    That's fair to say, yes, with the important caveat that it isn't a 1:1 replacement of Webflow, which is exactly the point.
- iamacyborg 9mo ago
  I’m not sure the world needed yet another CMS
  - danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
    It doesn't. The person is saying they built just the functionality they needed. Probably 25% of a CMS. That's the point.

stefan_ 9mo ago

Oh, but that doesn't matter. SaaS tools aren't bought by the people that have to use them. Entire groups in big companies (HR & co) are delegating the majority of their job to SaaS and all failures are blamed on the people who have to interact with them while they are entirely ancillary to their job.

WarmWash 9mo ago

I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones. It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion. There is only one program that offers this ability, but you need to pay for the entire software suite, and the process is painfully convoluted anyway. We went from doing maybe 2-3 files a day to do doing 2-3 files an hour. I have repeated ad-nausea that the magic of LLMs is the ability to built the exact tool you need for the exact job you are doing. No need for the expensive and complex 750k LOC full tool shed software suite.

magicalist 9mo ago
> It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion. is this like a meta-joke? > I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones. The funny thing about examples like this is that they mostly show how dumb and inefficient the market is with many things. This has been possible for a long time with, you know, people, just a little more expensive than a Claude subscription, but would have paid for itself many times over through the years.
- mwigdahl 9mo ago
  It's not just a joke, it's a meta-joke! To address the substance of your comment, it's probably an opportunity cost thing. Programmers on staff were likely engaged in what was at least perceived as higher value work, and replacing the $250/mo subscription didn't clear the bar for cost/benefit. Now with Claude, it's easy to make a quick and dirty tool to do this without derailing other efforts, so it gets done.
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    We have no programers on staff, we are not a tech company. I know we are in a bubble here, but AI has definitely made its way out of silicon valley.

dkarl 9mo ago

I worked on a product that had to integrate with Salesforce because virtually all of our customers used it. It must have been a terrible match for their domain, because they had all integrated differently, and all the integrations were bad. There was virtually no consistency from one customer to next in how they used the Salesforce data model. Considering all of these customers were in the same industry and had 90% overlapping data models, I gave up trying to imagine how any of them benefited from it. Each one must have had to pay separately for bespoke integrations to third-party tools (as they did with us) because there was no commonality from one to the next. One thing that's interesting is that their original Salesforce implementations were so badly done that I could imagine them being done with an LLM. The evergreen stream of work that requires human precision (so far, anyway) is all of the integration work that comes afterwards.

robocat 9mo ago

> So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool [SaaS] that they have to hammer into a circle hole. You are assuming that corporations have the capability to design the software they need. There are many benefits to SaaS software, and some significant costs (e.g. integration). One major benefit of SaaS is domain knowledge and most people underestimate the complexity of even well known domains (e.g. accounts). Companies also underestimate the difficulty of aligning diverging political needs within the business, and they underestimate the expense of distraction on a non-core area that there is no business advantage to becoming competent at. As a vendor sometimes our job was simply to be the least worst solution. At least that's what I saw.

danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
this is true in many cases and not in many cases. Another true one is payments - it's complex AF and and no one will sit down and vibe code it. A CRM? Easy in many cases. Some workflow tool? Easy, they know the exact workflow. So, sure, some products will go the way of the dodo and some will not.
- nasmorn 8mo ago
  Only the still meek vibe code payments, the truly brave simply install the Stripe MCP directly in their on site chat window
  - danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
    this is hilarious

jayd16 9mo ago

Why waste your time on something that isn't your core business when, presumably, the SAASes of the world will use the new tech and lower prices as well?

danielmarkbruce 8mo ago
In most cases they can't. The cost they face is sales and marketing. Acquiring a customer costs money. Churn happens.