zlacker

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.

>>mwigda+(OP)
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.

>>mwigda+(OP)
> 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.

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.