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Comment by nightski | Hacker News Reader

For me personally the snark isn't because their SRE team is incompotent. It's because software that tries to be everything to everyone is inherently terrible. It's not fun to use for the users, and so many compromises need to be made on the technology side to make that happen that it ends up just being crap all around. This includes Salesforce, SAP, Dynamics, any platforms like that which scale many industries.

Flexibility and abstraction come at a high cost. It doesn't really matter though, world domination at all costs is the name of the game.

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AI changes this equation fundamentally, in a way that VC and SaaS founders still haven't realized. Nobody ever liked having to change their business, their workflows, or ducting taping a customization in a SaaS, they did because as we moved from centralized mainframe apps, to PC client-server and then Web based distributed apps, it became increasingly more cost-effective to suffer with a generic, one-size-fits-all SaaS than building at home.

AI coding changes this a lot.

I'm going to give this a "maybe"; the challenge with large scale software isn't in authoring new code or whatever, it's in managing complexity.

I think AIs / agents (and more importantly how we are learning to use them effectively) may help in that regard, but only if they are able to manage that complexity. This'll depend on context window sizes, their ability to explore a codebase, and how well their operators can provide relevant information.

But that's only what they can consume (so codebase, documentation, etc), on top of that are the people that work with / for these systems for decades and who know a lot about things outside of what's written down.

Thing is, if one piece or suite of software doesn't try to be everything (in a fairly consistent way), businesses that need certain functionality will end up with various different tools from different suppliers, which is at the very least just as complex and expensive to manage, and in practice more expensive.

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