> I'm not a frontend guy, I'm an operations guy that sometimes does some backends. So it's likely a solid 2.5 days for me to build the pair of these, probably more I haven't touched Javascript in over a decade.

Right, understood and agreed, but this was not about you and your specific skills or lack thereof; your anecdote was in support of an argument that companies would stop their SaaS because LLMs enable them to build in house.

That was your argument, right?

So in the absence of LLMs, if the company wanted to stop paying for the SaaS, would they have chosen you to do the replacement, or someone who had recent experience in the tech?

Look, we are interested in comparing the time taken to replace the SaaS with an LLM, and the time taken to replace the SaaS without LLM assistance.

That's really the only two scenarios under discussion, so lets explore those exhaustively:

1. Without LLMs: In the worst case scenario, the company had to pay for 2.5 days of employee time with the best case being 1 day of employee time. Lets go with something in-between like 1.5 days of dev time.

2. With LLMs: The company pays for 0.5 days of employee time (includes the overhead of token cost/subscription).

The difference between the only two scenarios that we have is literally a single day of employee costs!

I am skeptical that the company failed to leave the SaaS earlier because they didn't want to eat the cost of a 1.5 paid days for an employee, but a difference of a single day of cost was enough to tip the scales.