alt Hacker News> 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.
I don't think that's entirely correct. You can do TDD style development with AI and it leads to better results.
It's just that messing with a company's core manufacturing is something they don't do lightly. They work with multiple shifts of staff that are supposed to work in these environments. People generally don't have a lot of computer skills, so things need to be simple, repeatable, and easy to explain. Any issues with production means cost increases, delays happen, and money is lost.
That being said, these companies are always looking for better ways to do stuff, to eliminate work that is not needed, etc. That's your way in. If there's a demonstrable ROI, most companies get a lot less risk averse.
That used to involve bespoke software integrations. Those are developed at great cost and with some non trivial risk by expensive software agencies. Some of these projects fail and failure is expensive. AI potentially reduces cost and risk here. E.g. a generic SAP integration isn't rocket science to vibe code. We're talking well documented and widely used APIs here. You'd want some oversight and testing here obviously. But it's the type of low level plumbing that traditionally gets outsourced to low wages countries. Using AI here is probably already happening at a large scale.