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.
Now with Claude, it's easy to make a quick and dirty tool to do this without derailing other efforts, so it gets done.
However possible it was to do this work in the past, it is now much easier to do it. When something is easier it happens more often.
No one is arguing it was impossible to do before. There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.
I wonder how much of the benefit of AI is just companies permitting it to bypass their process overhead. (And how many will soon be discovering why that process overhead was there)
Experience shows that that's the case at least 50% of the time
I know we are in a bubble here, but AI has definitely made its way out of silicon valley.
Agreed absolutely, but that's also what I'm talking about. It's very clear it was a bad tradeoff. Not only $250/month x three seats, but also apparently whatever the opportunity cost just of personnel tied up doing "2-3 files a day" when they could have been doing "2-3 files an hour".
Even if we take at face value that there are no "programmers" at this company (with an employee commenting on hacker news, someone using Claude to iterate on a GUI frontend for this converter, and apparently enough confidence in Claude's output to move their production system to it), there are a million people you could have hired over the last decade to throw together a file conversion utility.
And this happens all the time in companies where they don't realize which side of https://xkcd.com/1205/ they're on.
It's great if, like personal projects people never get started on, AI shoves them over the edge and gets them to do it, but we can also be honest that they were being pretty dumb for continually spending that money in the first place.
I mean, I'm absolutely familiar with how company decision making and inertia can lead to these things happening, it happens constantly, and the best time to plant a tree is today and all that, but the ex post facto rationalizations ring pretty hollow when the solution was apparently vibecoded with no programmers at the company, immediately saved them $750 a month and improved their throughput by 8x.
Clearly it was a very bad call not to have someone spend a couple of days looking into the feasibility of this 10 years ago.