Can also say the year that subscriptions go down, because now you can finally build your own systems exactly to your liking. Save money and have something that works just for you. LLMs are awesome.
Where internal tools shine is internal operational workflows that are being done manually. You're not replacing Slack or Salesforce, you're replacing the current process where a developer needs to SSH into the server to run a SQL query, or where the Operations team fills out a Google doc which the Finance team pastes into an Excel spreadsheet which runs a bunch of VBA calculations.
This is the key distinction people need to understand, until then it just piles up and lot of companies main business is not software, something else.
You're aware that Slack has many more features besides chat, right?
This statement falls purely into the mistake #1 category.
Being able to build something that works just how you want with minimal investment is a huge value add.
I ditched web analytics platforms and just send events in jsonl format to disk.
I have a regularly scheduled job that imports it all into a duckdb database and updates a very custom report. I can also ask random questions like “is there a cohort of users who use feature A and B?”.
It’s super lightweight and incredible.
As long as the phase of the software and users are lighweight - agree these internal tools can be built, but as scale comes that is when the challenges show up is what I have observed.
How far we have come!
0. "The cost of achieving a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023, or 13× per year." https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought
So, same end result (cost exceeds hiring a new engineer), but achieved differently.
The counter, I suppose, is the managers have to deal less with engineers telling them their ideas aren't good or well thought out.
1.) open weight models gain more popularity 2.) i'm making more money from these models than paying for them
if either happens, then I'll feel good about it either way
What do you mean? They need to recover hundreds of billions in sunk costs?
It's always about cheaper, better, faster. And when the thing being built extends beyond a single person, and still when working alone, conflict shows up in balancing the risks between these. The Strawman of Perfection is just that.
"It doesn't need to be perfect" is incredibly dismissive of the reality of the situation. Ignoring reality seems like a poor problem solving strategy.