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Comment by johnwatson11218 | Hacker News Reader

This is the time for AI assisted efforts to merge with open source to deliver alternatives to all these Big Company type proprietary software solutions. I have been thinking of what it would cost to create enterprise workflow and document management but based on nodejs. Perhaps targeting the business markets of a smaller country such as Pakistan could be a way to get real world feedback before larger markets are targeted. Need all the documentation translated into Pashto? There is now an app for that. Seriously - how hard would it be to recreate the 80% of features that Autodesk is actually used for? Just to get something that is "good enough", using AI to architect it, design the test suites, the integration suites etc?

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And who is providing support when the file they create doesn't work?

At the end of the day test and integration is a stupid huge amount of work. Moreso when you have one large company that controls the format and makes "little oopsies" that you have to figure out and fix.

The problem is the cost to shift to a new product, not cost of the product.

Not sure what you guys are trying to say here but I have seen, with my own eyes, large enterprise software systems that end up being so fragile it makes you laugh. The incumbents in this space make dinosaurs look like spring chickens by comparison.

There are millions upon millions of dollars being spent on stupid, outdated software that simply does not work. The main thrust of my original comment was that - "you thought open source was impressive? wait until the rise of AI powered open source". I think the highly arcane world of enterprise software is similar to being a travel agent in the mid to late 90s.

Do you think AI is going to solve the problems of proprietary data formats and retraining entire workforces to whole new workflows?

AI isn't, so far as I can tell, a universal Easy Button®.

Open Source didn't scratch the surface of those problems, but AI will solve them somehow?

I think that if you have the skills to manage a software project of any complexity then you, alone can create what teams are doing today. I think AI can characterize proprietary data formats and assist by writing parsers, providing helpful error messages, and pointing out inconsistencies and gaps in the specification. AI can eliminate the need for so much workforce. Rather than training existing workers, it can become the existing workers. ChatGPT is already more competent than 1/2 of the workers at my last job. Case in point - two teams were independently assigned a particular upgrade task. Since the project managers used different terms they didn't realize they were doing double work. Large language models could already disambiguate that kind of thing way back then, it is only getting better.

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