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jillesvangurpyesterday at 9:37 AM2 repliesview on HN

I'm seeing the opposite. AI is actually increasing the demand for what would previously be too expensive, bespoke integrations and solutions. Those are now becoming more feasible and doable. There is also the notion that a lot of companies are actually very behind on embracing software or SAAS. Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades.

The fallacy here is believing we already had all the software we were going to use and that AI is now eliminating 90% of the work of creating that. The reality is inverted, we only had a fraction of the software that is now becoming possible and we'll be busy using our new AI tools to create absolutely massive amounts of it over the next years. The ambition level got raised quite a bit recently and that is starting to generate work that can only be done with the support of AI (or an absolutely massive old school development budget).

It's going to require different skills and probably involve a lot more domain experts picking up easy to use AI tools to do things themselves that they previously would have needed specialized programmers for. You get to skip that partially. But you still need to know what you are doing before you can ask for sensible things to get done. Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere.

Our typical customers would need help with all of that. The amount of times I've had to deal with a customer that had vibe coded anything by themselves remains zero. Just not a thing in the industry. Most of them are still juggling spreadsheets and ERP systems.


Replies

pjc50yesterday at 10:25 AM

> Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades.

> Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere.

This is what I'm wondering about; things don't change because the company doesn't like change, and the risks of change are very real. So changes either have to be super incremental, or offer such a compelling advantage that they can't be ignored. And AI just doesn't offer the sort of reproducible, reliable results that manufacturing absolutely depends on.

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nitwit005yesterday at 9:22 PM

If you look at past automation efforts, the automation initially made workers more valuable. They could produce more, at lower cost, and there was plenty of demand. Eventually, you hit the realistic limits of demand though, and the number of workers started to drop.

If software gets cheaper, people will buy more of it, to a point.