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Comment by chris_money202 | Hacker News Reader

I think a pretty good example I had at work, we had the option to buy a software package from a 3rd party company. After reviewing the specs we needed, I told my manager to give me a few hours to see if I could produce what we needed with AI instead. Lo and behold, I was able to do it in just a few hours, AI package was tested, integrated, and we moved on. No where was any of that recorded that I just saved the company lots of money using AI. I bet there are lots of examples like this that just aren't adequately tracked at both micro and macro levels. For some reason we expected to to be able to see these huge gains from AI but we never bothered putting systems in place to observe them.

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I suspect we are still at the stage where for every story like this there's an offsetting story in the other direction of "I (more commonly reported as my coworker) tried to implement something with AI, messed it up, and ended up wasting a ton of time and resources on that mistake".

It's not that AI can't be useful, but that there's a learning curve, and early in the learning curve we should expect as many resources to be spent learning as resources are saved by using the thing. A macro level view of the economy as a whole sees this as "zero economic growth".

While personally this excites me: the idea that I can build a custom software that fits that specific problem is quite amazing.

But on company level I see it as a risk: suddently you might have 50 new small apps created by people who might not even work at the company who are not constantly tested for security/privacy ... but more important who once done are not pushing the frontier of how a much better solution might be in that area cause nobody is putting time into them. So as time passes by this has the risk to become legacy software used to run your business. yes of course you can point an AI to all of them and prompt it to make them better but that means focus on that instead of your core business.

Maybe we will see solutions appearing to manage this kind of tech debt.

I think this is probably going to be the mainstream. Once you are able to define what you need LLMs are able to produce it. If you are able to understand what is delivered, it ends up working as expected.

I needed and embedded document based database, a friend of mine with 30 years experience was vibe coding a database in Rust and I asked him if he can make it support Swift and be embedded in iOS and in few minutes he delivered that using Claude. Then I started vibe coding on it with Codex adding features I wanted and integrating it into my project. It worked as expected. I think it is close to reaching parity with MongDB, years of work vibe coded in a weekend.

There’s going to be fundamental changes in how we program computers and consequently the IT industry.

Yes. We needed to do a huge migration project that would otherwise have taken us six months and/or cost more than $100k. With the help of Opus 4.5 we finished it in three weeks for a total token cost of $1200. I posted about it last month.

So if you want to think of it in economic terms, some software consulting firm that would otherwise have made six figures instead did not. The vast majority of the money we would have spent stayed in our pocket. Slight decreases like this in “velocity of money” no doubt add up to significant sums.

GDP is a classic example of Goodhart's law.

This should show in up in higher margins for the company.

Is your company a software firm or considered something outside of pure software?

Software firm, small, privately held.

It should show in decreased revenue for the company you didn't buy the product from. It also should show up at your company either as increased profit margin, increased investment, increase in total employee wages, or increased dividend payout.

If this is happening on a widespread basis in the economy we should see evidence of it sometime this year and that's what investors are anticipating with SaaS stocks.

Your point on visibility of the value of avoiding the initial purchase makes sense, but theres something your missing. Theres a cost to maintaining and supporting the software. The cost of that wont be factored in either. It might still end up being a positive value proposition, but that needs to be seen

> For some reason we expected to to be able to see these huge gains from AI but we never bothered putting systems in place to observe them but we never bothered putting systems in place to observe them.

I am an economic dummie, but wouldn't the metric be revenue per employee?

If your company is unwilling to pay for software when writing software, what makes you think other companies or individuals will be willing to pay for yours? Can’t they just vibe code _your_ solution too?

What was the software package?

simulation model of a hardware component

Typically I wouldn't press on the details - but do you have any reason not to name the specific package/vendor and/or the use case? It's nice to draw from the actual experiences of HN commenters and I'd be interested to hear how you used the technology in question in actual practice.

I didn't push because I imagine they want to stay anonymous, but I am also curious.

Doesn’t this hurt the economy ?

I think it would depend on which company is the more innovative. Is the 3rd party going to use the money we give them to drive further economic growth and innovation? Or is the money saved going to do that. Its a tough call and could go both ways. We need to somehow measure how the pendulum swings with more accuracy and clearer signals.

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