Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

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Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation.

And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base?

“No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”.

I once had influence over the buying decision to support an implementation I was leading. I found this perfect SaaS product by a one man shop who was local.

Working with my CTO and lawyers, we made a proposal to the founder. We would sign with him and be 70% of his post signing revenue if he agreed to give us our own self hosted instance and put his latest code in escrow with a third party (Green Mountain) and we would have non exclusive rights to use the code (but not distribute it) under certain circumstances.

He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs.

Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company.

The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a outsider. Internal solution used to be bad because if the person with the knowledge of the codebase left, you ended up screwed. But with LLMs and "vibe" coding, there becomes a disconnect between the code and whoever wrote it. Making it easier to later make modifications on that same codebase, using ... LLMs.

We have seen this before with home grown VB apps, excel spreadsheets with VBScript, FoxPro etc. How has that turned out every single time as requirements changed and the number of people dependent on it grew?

I think in a couple of years we are going to same type of mess. We are already seeing a bunch of shitty AI companies getting funded with no technical cofounders. Look at a few of the YC companies

Did he agree?

Yep and he agreed to let us verify that the code he installed on our servers were built from source and the same code was in escrow at Green Mountain.

The terms weren’t as onerous as it sounds. It was basically if he stopped supporting it or got hit by a bus, we would get access.

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