Comment by eitally

Comment by eitally 3 days ago

2 replies

There are exceptions to what I'm about to say, but it is largely the rule.

The thing a lot of people who haven't lived it don't seem to recognize is that enterprise software is usually buggy and brittle, and that's both expected and accepted because most IT organizations have never paid for top technical talent. If you're creating apps for back office use, or even supply chain and sometimes customer facing stuff, frequently 95% availability is good enough, and things that only work about 90-95% of the time without bugs is also good enough. There's such an ingrained mentality in big business that "internal tools suck" that even if AI-generated tools also suck similarly it's still going to be good enough for most use cases.

It's important for readers in a place like HN to realize that the majority of software in the world is not created in our tech bubble, and most apps only have an audience ranging from dozens to several thousands of users.

jimbo808 3 days ago

Internal tools do suck as far as usability, but you can bet your ass they work if they're doing things that matter to the business, which is most of them. Almost every enterprise system hooks into the finance/accounting pipeline to varying degrees. If these systems do not work at your company I'd like to know which company you work at and whether they're publicly traded.

abracadaniel 3 days ago

A potential difference I see is that when internal tools break, you generally have people with a full mental model of the tool who can take manual intervention. Of course, that fails when you lay off the only people with that knowledge, which leads to the cycle of “let’s just rewrite it, the old code is awful”. With AI it seems like your starting point is that failure mode of a lack of knowledge and a mental model of the tool.