Comment by magicalist

Comment by magicalist 6 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.

mwigdahl 6 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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WarmWash 2 hours ago

We have no programers on staff, we are not a tech company.
I know we are in a bubble here, but AI has definitely made its way out of silicon valley.

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graeme 6 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 6 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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- thfuran 3 hours ago
  
  Sure, there's a lot of process that is entirely justified, but there's also a whole lot of process that exists for reasons that are no longer relevant or simply because there are a lot more people whose job it is to make process than whose job it is to stop people from making too much process.
  
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coldtea 4 hours ago

>The problem with this reasoning is it requires assuming that companies do things for no reason
Experience shows that that's the case at least 50% of the time

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