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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this reasoning is it requires assuming that companies do things for no reason.

However possible it was to do this work in the past, it is now much easier to do it. When something is easier it happens more often.

No one is arguing it was impossible to do before. There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.

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> There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.

I wonder how much of the benefit of AI is just companies permitting it to bypass their process overhead. (And how many will soon be discovering why that process overhead was there)

Sure, there's a lot of process that is entirely justified, but there's also a whole lot of process that exists for reasons that are no longer relevant or simply because there are a lot more people whose job it is to make process than whose job it is to stop people from making too much process.

>The problem with this reasoning is it requires assuming that companies do things for no reason

Experience shows that that's the case at least 50% of the time

> No one is arguing it was impossible to do before. There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.

I mean, I'm absolutely familiar with how company decision making and inertia can lead to these things happening, it happens constantly, and the best time to plant a tree is today and all that, but the ex post facto rationalizations ring pretty hollow when the solution was apparently vibecoded with no programmers at the company, immediately saved them $750 a month and improved their throughput by 8x.

Clearly it was a very bad call not to have someone spend a couple of days looking into the feasibility of this 10 years ago.

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