zlacker

>>peteth+(OP)
> The fear is that these [AI] tools are allowing companies to create much of the software they need themselves.

AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.

>>latefo+G02
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

>>mattma+072
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.

>>datsci+Bj2
surprising considering you just listed two primary use cases (exploring codebases/data models + creating documentation)

>>dehugg+Im2
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.

>>gmueck+vs2
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.

>>phatfi+TF2
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!”