Comment by WarmWash

Comment by WarmWash 3 hours ago

I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones. It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion.

There is only one program that offers this ability, but you need to pay for the entire software suite, and the process is painfully convoluted anyway. We went from doing maybe 2-3 files a day to do doing 2-3 files an hour.

I have repeated ad-nausea that the magic of LLMs is the ability to built the exact tool you need for the exact job you are doing. No need for the expensive and complex 750k LOC full tool shed software suite.

robocat 17 minutes ago

Was the custom tool developed by copying how the existing software worked? Copying existing functionality is not always possible, and doesn't capture the real costs.

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magicalist 3 hours ago

> It's not just a converter, it's a gui with the tools needed to facilitate a quick manual conversion.

is this like a meta-joke?

> I have a prime example of this were my company was able to save $250/usr/mo for 3 users by having Claude build a custom tool for updating ancient (80's era) proprietary manufacturing files to modern ones.

The funny thing about examples like this is that they mostly show how dumb and inefficient the market is with many things. This has been possible for a long time with, you know, people, just a little more expensive than a Claude subscription, but would have paid for itself many times over through the years.

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mwigdahl 2 hours ago

It's not just a joke, it's a meta-joke! To address the substance of your comment, it's probably an opportunity cost thing. Programmers on staff were likely engaged in what was at least perceived as higher value work, and replacing the $250/mo subscription didn't clear the bar for cost/benefit.
Now with Claude, it's easy to make a quick and dirty tool to do this without derailing other efforts, so it gets done.

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graeme 2 hours ago

The problem with this reasoning is it requires assuming that companies do things for no reason.
However possible it was to do this work in the past, it is now much easier to do it. When something is easier it happens more often.
No one is arguing it was impossible to do before. There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.

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- lmm 2 hours ago
  
  > There's a lot of complexity and management attention and testing and programmer costs involved in building something in house such that you need a very obvious ROI before you attempt it especially since in house efforts can fail.
  I wonder how much of the benefit of AI is just companies permitting it to bypass their process overhead. (And how many will soon be discovering why that process overhead was there)
  
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