Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstummbillig | Hacker News Reader

> Can you give a hint about what you've built that generates this kind of ROI?

Sure. Absolutely nothing amazing: (Mostly) internal software for a medical business I am currently building.

It's just that the actual cost of hiring someone is even quite a bit higher, than what is printed on the paycheck and the risk attached to anyone leaving on a small team is huge (n=0 and n=1 is an insane difference). GPT4 has bridged the gap between being able to do something and not being able to do something at various points over the past year.

EDIT: And to be clear, while I won't claim "rockstar programmer", I have coded for roughly 20 years, which is the larger part of my life.

View on HN

Just spoke to a restaurant group owner in Mexico who was able to eliminate their web developer because he can now ask ChatGPT to draft up a basic website.

The kicker? It couldn't do the interactive menu their old website did, so now clicking menu links to a PDF. Which is always, ALWAYS, better.

> he can now ask ChatGPT to draft up a basic website.

I'm pretty sure he could have done that with one of the thousands tools like Wix, many years before ChatGPT.

yes, but which one of thouse thousand, how long would it take to learn how to use it, etc. Still less friction in just asking ChatGPT to do this via the same interface you ask it to do a bunch of other stuff.

Even just looking at ChatGPT as a better frontend to the Wix help docs, ChatGPT empowered this restaurant owner to do the job themselves, rather than having to have a person do it. Which means that person is out of a job. Good for the restaurant owner, but bad for that person. Which means it's down to personal relationships and how you treat people and all those soft skills that aren't programming.

Pretty sure he still does that. Unless ChatGPT can now test and deploy a website as well as generate text.

It's better with accessibility?

Sorry, but why is pdf better than html? If pdf is better, would you prefer every website just downloaded a pdf to your phone when you visit their url, instead of serving you html? If not, why is it different for a restaurant menu?

It's better in the pragmatic sense of like, it's more likely to be updated. They already have a PDF or docx laying around because they had to design their print menu, so now they can just upload it. But yes, ideally the menu would be html and would be accurate and up to date and responsive on mobile.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com