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Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

Companies are not accepting that their entire business will mostly go away. They are mostly frogs boiling in water, that's why they are kinda just incorporating these little chat bots and LLMs into their business, but the truth of the matter is it's all going away and it's impossible to believe. Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking voice with zero programming. They just don't believe that's the reality, we're talking about Kodak moment.

Worker productivity is secondary to business destruction, which is the primary event we're really waiting for.

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That's silly. You still need a way to track and prioritize tasks even if you use voice input. Jira may be replaced with something better, built around an LLM from the ground up. But the basic project management requirements will never go away.

Yes, that's quite easy. I say "Hey reorganize the tasks like-so, prioritize this, like so", and if I really need to, I can go ahead and hook up some function calls but I suspect this will be unnecessary with a few more LLM iterations (if even that). You can keep running from how powerful these LLMs are, but I'll just sit and wait for the business/startup apocalypse (which is coming). Jira will not be replaced by something better, it'll be replaced by some weekend project a high schooler makes. The very fact that it's valued at over a billion dollars in the market is just going to be a profound rug pull soon enough.

So let me keep it real, I am shorting Atlassian over the next 5 years. Asana is another, there's plenty of startup IPOs that need to be shorted to the ground basically.

What sort of assurances can I get from that weekend project? I think we're going to build even more obscene towers of complexity as nobody knows how anything works anymore, because they choose not to.

What assurances do you get from the internals of an LLM?

I think in your rush to respond you may have accidentally made a solid point against your argument.

No not really. The people that are behind the LLMs don't really know why it keeps getting better with more compute and data, they are literally just trying shit. Yet, the world has seen just how useful the thing is. We don't have any assurances from the damn thing, yet it's the most useful thing we ever made (at least software-wise).

this is a choice to make though… smart teams will know how everything works…

If replacing Jira is really as easy as you claim, then it would have happened by now. At the very least, we'd be getting hit by a deluge of HN posts and articles about how to spin up your very own project management application with an LLM.

I think that this sentiment, along with all of the hype around AI in general, is failing to grasp a lot of the complexity around software creation. I'm not just talking about writing the code for a new application - I'm talking about maintaining that application, ensuring that it executes reliably and correctly, thinking about the features and UX required to make it as frictionless as possible (and voice input isn't the solution there, I'm very confident of that).

You are not understanding what I am saying. I am saying its the calm before the storm before everyone realizes they are paying a bunch of startups for literally no comparative value given AI. First the agile people are going to get fired, then the devs are just going to go "oh yeah I just manage everything in my LLM".

I'll be here in a year, we can have this exact discussion again.

I understand what you are saying, I just don't agree with it.

"AI" is not going to wholesale replace software development anytime soon, and certainly not within a year's time because of the reasons I mentioned. The way you worded your post made it sound like you believed that capability was already here - nevertheless, whether you think it's here now or will be here in a year, both estimates are way off IMO.

> I’ll be here in a year

Me too. Mostly so I can laugh though.

I agree with you to a point.

In smaller businesses some roles won’t need to be hired anymore.

Meanwhile in big corps, some roles may transition from being the source of presumed expertise to being one neck to choke.

I’d love it not to be true, but the truth is Jira is to projects what Slack/Teams are to messaging. When everybody is a project manager Jira gets paid more, not less.

If there was only one consequence, and that consequence is Jira and Atlassian being destroyed, then I am all for it!

Realistically though, they might incorporate that high schooler's software into Jira, to make it even more bloated and they will sell it to your employer soon enough! Then team lead Chris will enter your birthday and your vacation days in it too, to enable it to also do vacation planning, without asking you. Next thing is, that Atlassian sells you out and you receive unsolicited AI calls for your holiday planning.

> Take something like JIRA, it's entirely laughable because a simple LLM can handle entire project management with freaking voice with zero programming

When I used a not-so-simple LLM to make it act as a text adventure game it could barely keep track of the items in my inventory, so TBH i am a little bit skeptical that an LLM can handle entire project management - even without voice.

Perhaps it might be able to use tools/MCP/RPC to call out to real project management software and pretend to be your accountant/manager/whoever, but i wouldn't call that the LLM itself doing the project management task - and someone would need to write that project management software.

There are innovative ways to accomplish the consistency you seek for the example application you mentioned. They are coming a lot sooner than you think, but hey this thread is a bit of a poker game before the flop, I’m just placing my bet - you can call the bluff.

We just have to wait for the cards to flip, and that’s happening on a quadratic curve (some say exponential).

Free beer tomorrow.

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