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Comment by ramoz | Hacker News Reader

A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.

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What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.

Or you end up with a certification process, which will of course introduce it's own problems but startups doing things the right way and not just "moveing fast and breaking things" can thrive.

Oracle have routinely had multimillion pound contract failures and people keep buying from them. Big vendors are too big to fail.

Same with Deloitte

no one's getting fired for hiring either one.

Those are custom software or heavily customized implementations of ERP and similar systems for very large organizations. I’m talking more about the SMB market where today it’s possible for a small team to carve out a niche and make a nice living or even bootstrap a venture that competes with a large player that has poor UX or antiquated feature designs.

The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.

I used to gripe about various ERP companies but after having dealt with enough, yeah, that's just what the world of ERP systems is like. You will spend your time even with the best of them desiring to scream endlessly at everyone who works there. And they also know your pain but are powerless to help.

there are no 2 identical deployed ERP systems.

It's just an umbrella term for "weak process glue code".

>The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.

It's even simpler. Youre not paying oracle for some delapidated HR system. You're paying for the legion of accountability that is their on-site engineers to fix stuff for you when things screw up. You're essentially subscribing to a team of engineers you don't need to directly pay salary and benefits to.

People who think you can out efficiency that kind of accountability don't understand how large orgs think.

> It will completely kill the market.

it will kill all the people in that hospital too

What is this, Humanitarian News?

thankyou

The real Hackers were the ones actually trying to minimize suffering all along. Not reproduce it at scale.

But the Torment Nexus is such an interesting technical challenge! and I don’t personally torment people: I just move protobufs around! - Software Engineer #1 and #2 excuses

Yeah but only one of those actually puts those responsible in prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

> On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients

Those patients weren't hurt. Totally different from the post you're replying to.

I mean, the stories about how stuff was getting built in the late 90s/early 2000s aren’t much worse.

As a SWE that has only ever worked for an employer or on his own projects, this makes me wonder: how would someone even get such a contract? Did this person already have a consulting business? Do you just call up random hospitals and ask if you can demo an inventory management system for them? Did this person already know people at the hospital? I know technical folks that do independent consulting, but even with a vibecoded product, how is it that anyone can just get such a contract?

Frictional money.

People really have a misconception about the sums of money that companies operate on on a regular basis. If you are a people person and know essentially how to sell yourself, you can "scrape" money on the fact that nobody is going to look or think too hard about some contract that represents a tiny fraction of the years budget.

That still leaves the question of how one gets their foot in the door. Lots of us are aware of the budgets but we don't get how's sales work at that level.

The only way something like this would work is through "networking", and trust that you are capable of delivering.

I'm practical terms, go to where the decision makers are and shmooz with them. It's a numbers game. Eventually someone will say yes.

That's what it means to be a "people person" in the context of trying to sell a product, yes. Getting within 2 degrees of a decision maker can open up millions for you, while being a rounding error for every company you work with.

He's already in the whole consulting sphere around these hospitals in his area.

This hospital will learn some hard lessons. I hope their backup strategy is good. I'm surprised they can field software from an entity that isn't SOC2 & HIPAA certified.

No worries! At worst, the contractor can just tell Claude to make sure the hospital knows they're appropriately certified. And the hospital can use Claude to make sure the certs are valid. Everybody wins, except the ones who end up dead. Or with their health destroyed.

> from an entity that isn't SOC2 & HIPAA certified

What do you think the fake Delve attestation scandal was about? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319

As a cybersecurity IR professional as much as I hate to see this happen to a hospital this kind of thing is responsible for essentially tripling my income over the last 3 years.

Have you tried to talk him out of it, and have you considered blowing the whistle on him? He could kill people!

Wow. This is like every other gold rush. Millions will walk into the ice and snow, somehow not questioning that their ability to dig is not unique.

Well, selling shovels has always been a good way to deal with that problem

The shovel sellers are ringing the cash register.

This is going to happen all over. Company I'm currently contracting with has gone AI everything (aka technical debt hell), and they're gonna suffer for it. I'm glad my consulting contract ends in 2 months. I don't want to be around for the crash

Don't help him. Let him figure it out by himself, else they (he and hospital) will never learn.

I don't have time for that. I just told him he needs to hire somebody

I was going to say to open yourself up as a contractor and scape some of the money off top. But it sounds like you dint need that opportunity.

That sadly does seem to be the trajectory of 5-10 years from now, though. I can't speak to if "AI is the future" of 30+ years from now, but these coming years sounds rife for "janitors" to clean up all the slop being produced by newly empowered idea guys

Or, "help" by asking questions, or otherwise by sharing an AI review/analysis/suggestions, since they're into that kind of thing.

Definitely cleaning up other people's AI mess for them for free is not a good use of time.

A hospital could not learn a bigger lesson from this person than their existing big players.

(Screams in "deployed in 2026 a new product that only works in internet explorer" in healthcare).

I work at a university and we still have some workstations that need IE as well, for a healthcare vendor app that needs ActiveX. Up until recently we even had some machines running Windows 7.

I'd really like to know how he won contracts, just in general. Did he have some connections. And he doesn't even know how to get it to run on a server by himself? There's millions of people that can do that, if he can win contracts why worry about vibe coding at all, just hire someone to do it. Winning contracts is the challenge in my view.

He's already within the consulting sphere around hospitals in his area.

I hope you have quoted him a very very high hourly rate.

Did he lie about HIPAA compliance?

Heaven help us.

Hospitals? Vibe code?

Dear Lord. Respect to your friend for mad marketing skills, however. Selling slop to mission-critical sectors is next level.

jfc lmao

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