Posted by brandur 2 days ago
I know a founder who has been building in public and it has had zero impact on his inbound.
I don’t think I can take the author seriously after this claim. They must be a beginner when it comes to AI coding. And I’m not advocating vibe yolo coding either.
On the other hand, if someone has a $400/mo Jira bill that means at least 40 users, so $400/month seems like a distraction compared to total comp.
But again, it takes just one SDE to spend a weekend replacing it. That SDE probably has strong opinions on why Jira doesn’t work for them, and strong opinions on what a task system looks like in an AI world. In this world, I’d say Jira is the risk, regardless of its monthly cost.
He, the CEO, saw this as saving $40K per year. Until I asked simple questions:
What happens when Joe leaves?
When he goes on vacation?
If he has a health emergency?
The LLM isn't going to magically maintain the software, evolve, fix or support it.
What are you going to do?
The obvious conclusion was that he likely had to hire another person to work with Joe on this in-house CRM and, at a minimum, have redundant project ownership. Backup for development, maintenance and support.
The easy conclusion was: This will save him $40K a year until he decides to hire another person, at which point this "free" software will cost him $150K per year, $110K/year more than what he was paying Salesforce. If he does not hire a second person to work in the internal CRM, he might get lucky and things could be fine for a few years or he will have to face a crisis at some point when Joe is no longer around and nobody knows the first thing about his mini-CRM, not even the LLM.
I wonder how many people are falling for this trap these days. The allure of zero-cost software vs. the reality of introducing risk, technical debt and organizational risk.
To be sure, we are using LLM's extensively. However, until this is better understood, in the realm of software development it is constrained to what I would call "advanced auto complete" at the file level rather than anything resembling project-wide work. When we do write full applications, they are often relatively trivial internal tools that a person could complete in not much more than one week. In other words, easy to understand and code if another engineer had to jump in and none of these utilities are mission critical.