Great quote!

I dislike Jira as much as anyone but these anecdotes are far removed from what I've experienced. Opus 4.8 continues to trip itself up over trivialities that go beyond one-shotting a most basic CRUD app, let alone implementing something complex you yourself don't understand.

Sure everyone could build their own XYZ with AI, but unless that has comparable economies of scale, everyone really doing so is gonna set us back. imho.

Also, some software businesses use a ton of aggregated or hard to get data which needs to be synthesized and that doesn't go away even if the llm driven coding is cheap.

Once you get people using your software, you have people using your software.

Every new line increases dramatically the complexity of the software which requires more cost and most maintenance. If you stop at a single tool this is still manageable.

Imagine now that you do the same for 10 other products - all critical systems. You will end up running the tools to save on imaginary money. Even then, software vendors can simply undercut and offer the software cheaper because they use agents too.

So building everything in-house is not the right way to go unless you have no other option - which was always the case pre coding assistants.

If you ask engineers of course they will say yes. It is yet another nice toy project and interesting challenge. But decision makers need to learn to say no - more often they used to.

So I'll build something simple for us, that integrates with our systems and how we like to do things.

It won't cost us much since our meagre requirements are nothing comparted to a full fledged Jira replacement.

Without LLMs it would have taken maybe a couple of days effort and perhaps an hour a month to fix any bugs we miss or add an extra overlooked feature.

With LLMs ... we shall see.

We won't set out to solve all of the world's issue tracking problems, so that will save a lot of time.

KISS is the goal.

It gave me all sorts of reasons why this was a terrible idea. I've never seen it resist a task so directly and relentlessly.

It knew.

One point worth considering is that tools like Jira and Salesforce have dozens of screens and modals. But you only ever look at one at a time. So the enormity of the ask "duplicate Jira" is hard to see in its totality.

With Google docs, the entirety of the tool is almost one screen. It resists decomposition. So the true gravity of the request is more in your face.

You say you want to duplicate Asana or Service Now or Jira or Zendesk? Great, here's the keys to the car, a tank of gas, and a quarter to call me on a payphone when you get there. Oh wait payphones don't exist anymore...but it doesn't matter because you're never getting there.

These software platforms are built by thousands of engineers over more than a decade of dedicated work. They are they way they are for reasons. To think someone can duplicate them with some clever prompting is to completely fail to understand the scale of the problem at hand.