I wonder about these takes. Have you never worked in a complex system in a large org before?

OK, sure, we can parse a PDF reliably now, but now we need to act on that data. We need to store it, make sure it ends up with the right people who need to be notified that the data is available for their review. They then need to make decisions upon that data, possible requiring input from multiple stakeholders.

All that back and forth needs to be recorded and stored, along with the eventual decision and the all supporting documents and that whole bundle needs to be made available across multiple systems, which requires a bunch of ETLs and governance.

An LLM with a prompt doesn't replace all that.

We need to think terms of light cones, not dog and pony take downs of whatever system you are currently running. See where thigns are going.

I have worked in large systems, both in code and people, compilers, massive data processing systems, 10k business units.

I don't know what light cones or dog and pony mean here but I'm interested in your take - would you care to expand a bit on how the future can reshape that very complicated set of steps and humans described in the parent?

I think collingreen followed-up better than I ever could, so I'm hoping you can respond to them with more details.

Can you prompt a salesforce replacement for an org with 100 000 employees?

Yesterday I read an /r/singularity post in awe cus of a screenshot of a lead management platform from OAI in a japan convention supposedly meant a direct threat to SalesForce. Like, yeah sure buddy.

I would say most acceleracionist/AI bulls/etc don't really understand the true essential complexity in software development. LLMs are being seen as a software development silver bullets, and we know what happens with silver bullets.

Come back your comment in 18 months.

I assume this is a slap intended to imply that ai actually IS a silver bullet answer to the parent's described problem and in just 18 months they will look back and realize how wrong they are.

Is that what you mean and, if so, is there anything in particular you've seen that leads you to see these problems being solved well or on the 18 month timeline? That sounds interesting to look at to me and I'd love to know more.

It isn't a silver bullet in that it can just "make software" but it is changing the entire dynamic.

You can't do point sampling to figure out where things are going. We have to look at the slope. People see a paper come out, look at the results and say, "this fails for x, y and z. doesn't work", that is now how scientific research works. This is why two minute papers has the tag line, "hold on to your papers ... two papers down the line ..."

Copy and paste the whole thread into a SOTA model and have meta me explain it.

That's not why more experienced people are doubting you.

They're doubting you because the non-digital portions of processes change at people/org speed.

Which is to say that changing a core business process is a year political consensus, rearchitecture, and change management effort, because you also have to coordinate all the cascading and interfacing changes.

> changing a core business process is a year political consensus, rearchitecture, and change management effort

You are thinking within the existing structures, those structures will evaporate. All along the software supply chain, processes will get upended, not just because of how technical assets will be created, but also how organizations themselves are structured and react and in turn how software is created and consumed.

This is as big as the invention of the corporation, the printing press and the industrial revolution.

I am not here to tutor people on this viewpoint or defend it, I offer it and everyone can do with it what they will.

Ha. Look back on this comment in a few years.

Software without data moats, vender lock-in, etc sure will. All the low handing fruit saas is going to get totally obliterated by LLM built-software.

If I'm an autobody shop or some other well-served niche, how unhappy with them do I have to be to decide to find a replacement, either a competitor of theirs that used an LLM, or bring it in house and go off and find a developer to LLM-acceleratedly make me a better shopmonkey? And there are the integrations. I don't own a low hanging fruit SaaS company, but it seems very sticky, and since the established company already exists, they can just lower prices to meet their competitors.

B2B is different from B2C, so if one vendor has a handful of clients and they won't switch away, there's no obliterating happening.

What's opened up is even lower hanging fruit, on more trees. A SaaS company charging $3/month for the left-handed underwater basket weaver niche now becomes viable as a lifestyle business. The shovels in this could be supabase/similar, since clients can keep access to their data there even if they change frontends.

Which means that the current vc-software-ecosystem is the walking dead. The front end webdev is now going to do things that previously took a 10 person startup.

Integrations is part of the data moat I mentioned.

The only thing that will be different for most is vendor lock-in will be to LLM vendors.

Totally agree.