alt Hacker NewsIn my experience (enterprise software), customers buy our products not because we have a moat or some hard-to-achieve technical advantage but because they can speak to us in their words, they know we care, and we try solve their problems quickly.
Just yesterday I was speaking with the COO of a $200M/yr revenue company in the supply chain space. He'd learned Claude Code and built a couple apps to solve internal problems but reached out to talk to us. I asked him "you've been able to build some really impressive tools, clearly you can solve your own problems, why are you talking to me?" And he said "I have a business to run. I shouldn't be coding. I need somebody who understands my business & can solve my problems without taking a lot of my time."
Is there a cheaper way for him to solve his problems? Absolutely. But he wants to put the key in the ignition and know the car will turn on every time without thinking about it. There is an endless list of problems to solve; I don't think software businesses are going anywhere anytime soon.
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Yeah, this is how we survive.
I even dream of build tools for business to make apps (like Air table, but better) and even if you can do anything that do, perfectly, the software they need not means they want to babysit it all the time.
Is like the person that knows how cook, amazingly, yet hire a chef for take care of it most days.
Obviously a COO shouldnt be prompting Claude Code but your competition is someone in their team doing the same. The person in their team is trusted and knows the business.
This should be the top comment. The thing about growth of businesses overall, is that they want outsourced capacity (that’s what employees or contractors are) and that dynamic doesn’t go away because of AI, because like the comment mentioned, it’s not reliable enough in the sense that it can accept high-context vague instructions and ‘figure it out’ like an enterprise developer can.