This is called transaction cost economics, if anyone’s interested.
Salesforce is getting LLM superpowers at the same time the Enterprise is, so customizing and maintaining and extending Salesforce are all getting cheaper and better and easier for customers, consultants, and Salesforce in parallel.
Unless the LLMs are managing the entire process there’s still a value proposition around liability, focus, feature updates, integrations, etc. Over time that tech should make Salesforce get way cheaper, or, start helping them upsell bigger and badder Sales things that are harder to recreate.
And, big picture, the LLMs are well trained on Salesforce API code. Homegrown “free” versus industry-standard with clear billing, whatever we know versus man-decades of learning at a vendor, months of effort and all the risk & liability versus turnkey with built-in escape goats… at some point you’re paying money not to own, not to learn, not to be distracted, and to have jerks to sue if something goes bad.
With that said, the entire business world does not understand that software is more than just code. Even if you could write code instantly, making enterprise software would still take time, because there are simply so many high-stakes decisions to make, and so much fractal detail.
But why? It was always dramatically cheaper for enterprises to build rather than buy. They stopped doing that becuase they did that in the 90s and ended up with legacy codebases that they didn't know how to maintain. I can't see AI helping with that.
I definitely agree with this.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I guess you don't even really need to maintain software if it's just a tool you hacked together in a week. You can build v2 in another week. You'll probably want to change it anyways as your users and your org evolve. It's a big question for me how you maintain quality in this model but again, if your quality standard is "good enough", we're already there.
I think that’s gonna happen when you don’t need software and AI just does it all.
Better and cheaper hardware too. Maybe it'll be DeAI? (decentralized)
Will combine with Crypto 2.0 - whatever that may be.
We have! It has different names, shapes and forms. For example WiFi. Last I checked, it’s not designed for human in the loop and you need multiple levels of decoding for a human to make sense of it.
If it's not local, I saw this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47085906
"This entire stack could give you computing power equivalent to a 25k euro/month AWS bill for the cost of electricity (same electricity cost as running a few fridges 24/7) plus about 50k euros one-time to set it up (about 4 Mac Studios). And yes, it's redundant, scalable, and even faster (in terms of per-request latency) than standard AWS/GCP cloud bloat. Not only is it cheaper and you own everything, but your app will work faster because all services are local (DB, Redis cache, SSD, etc.) without any VM overhead, shared cores, or noisy neighbours."
Makes me think there will be these prompts like "convert this app to suit a new stack for my hardware for locally-optimized runtime."
How are people building the best local stacks? Will save people a ton of money if done well.
And the thing about many of these products isn't their feature set, it's their stability. It's their uptime. It's how they handle scaling invisibly and with no effort on your part. These are things you can't just write down from whole cloth, they are properties that emerge over time by adapting the the reality of scale. Coding isn't the whole deal, and your 20x clanker which can do nothing but re-arrange text in interesting patterns is going to have some trouble with the realities of taking that PoC to production. You'll still need experienced, capable people for that. And lots of time.
A lot of this "ermahgerd everything will change" drivel is based on some magical fundamentally new technology emerging in the near future that can do things that LLMs cannot do. But as far as anyone knows, that future may be never.
So even given a large improvement in agentic coding I'm not convinced it really changes the build vs buy equation much.