alt Hacker News> Software development is one of the most capital-intensive activities a modern company undertakes
The article is definitely written from a "high tech" industry lens. A mid-sized utility might spend $80-$150 million USD on IT capital projects in a year, but $2b on power pole maintenance. Utilities are a strong example, but any large enterprise manufacturing company is spending more on factory upgrades that programming.
> [...] built a functional replica of approximately 95% of Slack’s core product in fourteen days using LLM agents.
IT and Finance leadership and asset heavy companies are currently trying to wrap their head around the current economics of their 100+ SaaS contracts, and if it still makes sense with LLM powered developers. Can they hire developers in house to build the fraction of the tool they use from many of these companies, save on total cost and Opex?
I work with these companies a lot, and won't weigh in on the right decision. Bottom line "it depends" on many factors, some of which are not immediately obvious. The article still holds weight regardless of industries, but there is some nuance (talent availability, internal change cost, etc.) that also have to be considered.
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Yeah, that line came across as a little out of touch. I work for US DOTs, and a yearly allotment from a STIP of a small DOT is still measured in billions. Software spend is negligible. In fact, I would say software was always costly in terms of labor, but hasn’t been capital intensive until recently.
But I would like to agree with what you said with respect to SaaS spending coming under scrutiny. Our technical experts are becoming aware that we spend 5 or 6-figure sums on software with barely any users that we can clone with a coding agent in an afternoon. Eventually management will find out too and we’re going to cut a lot of dead weight.
100%.
A modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plant costs two-billion dollars just to build, and that doesn't include developing a drug to actually manufacture there, or a distribution network to sell what you make inside it.
the SaaS isn't going anywhere. you're going to AI yourself a Tier 4 data center and all of the requisite generators and UPS systems.
And how do you put liability on an LLM agent? I outsource to SaaS and consultants because 1) they're good at what they do, and 2) if they do it wrong I can sue them, escalate, berate them in social media, etc. and get things fixed; the AI pulls from so many places who is responsible? How do I validate that?
I blackbox that I can't audit is a lot of risk compared to expensive consultants with shortcomings.