From Records to Agents: The Overlooked Revolution in Enterprise Software | Hacker News Reader

From Records to Agents: The Overlooked Revolution in Enterprise Software

sperand.io

22 pointssebg14 comments

Why do so many see LLM as the inflection that makes this all possible? So much of the proposed automation can be built in totally deterministic ways for cheaper. Not everything benefits from being forced to look like a non deterministic language problem.

You might argue the biggest barrier to enterprise software innovation is the enterprise mindset vs a more engineering first mindset.

Rippling comes to mind as an example of bringing engineering to enterprise.

Yeah, this is where I stopped reading:

> LLMs now offer the intelligence layer that makes it all viable

LLMs are the opposite of what you want in enterprise software: unpredictable black boxes that go awry seemingly at random. I also can't see how they're at all necessary if you've got a state machine describing a process: the state machine tells you what needs to happen next.

Why code carefully when you can throw gobs of hardware at the problem and push the easy button?

This is the literal attitude for many in upper management. Don't build those nasty user interfaces that require design, wrap your APIs, buy your bidness peeps LLM licenses and move on.

This is an extreme. Artifact Assistance will be a new style of UI pattern, but it will live right alongside the fill-out forms and CRUD back-ends.

Is this really upper management though? I see a lot of what I assume to be engineers here taking the same approach, and many projects in open source.

As the youths say, "fuck around and find out". I wish them the best of luck, but I'm not betting it'll work.

I can go back to the NES or Atari and probably develop what would have been groundbreaking games and genres well before their time. But it took several small advancements and inflection points for those conceptual mechanics and hardware tricks to now be obvious in hindsight, and that's why no one did them earlier than they were done.

I agree there are a bunch of small inflections that make me confident such a solution is possible today, but llms just aren't one of them. Enterprise software is a prisoner of its own old mindset and low resource allocation.

But don't forget the Actor Model and Durable Execution! That'll surely keep the LLM on track.

Reminds me of a few years ago, when a bunch of people were breathlessly claiming that blockchain was the future of videogames, because it would let you transfer items from one game to another. Take your favorite Skyrim sword and use it in Minecraft, or whatever.

So I'd point out that that had been technically possible for decades, no blockchain necessary, and the reason it hadn't happened was that no developer actually wants it. And then they'd get super mad and call me names.

I'm afraid the AI bros are going to do more real-world damage than the crypto bros did, though.

Why does it feel like the author has never worked on enterprise software. The enterprise ERP systems are clumsy because they are built on a system of checks and balances . He talks about invoices finding their own approves when that is exactly what business rules are coded for - to handle complexity and notify in case of no approves found. Enterprise software is unsexy because it drives much of GAAP accounting and businesses do not like surprises in that domain.

> Imagine: the invoice isn’t just a record in your ERP anymore. It’s a machine that wants to get approved. It wants to get paid.

Stopped reading at that point. Realized this is just fluff from someone letting their imagination run away.

There's a lot of science-fiction in this "article". Almost none of the premises they listed for building the enterprise LLM future are actually there. No data silos, then data sharing, zero copy, encapsulated processes... yes I could imagine all this. But that's all we have for now, imagination.

pure word salad.. i want these drugs where can i get some?

Much like with drugs the enterprise software folks from time to time have to remember that getting high on their own supply is a bad idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com