[anonzzzies]

We re-trained or let go everyone that does not want to or cannot be a client facing consultant ; with our in house builder, we don't need fulltime devs anymore. It's 'productive' as in much higher profit margins with less people.

We are in the custom ERP space.

[rwyinuse]

I suspect this will be the future for many devs who develop boring CRUD apps, like ERP. No point having developers who only convert requirements crafted by others to code if LLM's can speed up that part enough. Such basic developer role will largely merge with business person / product owner / project manager role.

Ultimately, I think it's easier to teach business skills to a developer than to teach a business person enough code fluency to produce and deploy working code with help of LLM's.

[joblemblem]

Thanks for the reply.

I would like to explore this more if you are willing.

Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company?

Do you write code for yourself or for this business?

Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot be a client facing consultant”?

What is an “in house builder”?

What were these “fulltime devs” that you said “you don’t need anymore” doing before these llms?

Do your customers know you swapped from human workers to llms? Are they comfortable with this transition?

How did this change result in “much higher profit margins”?

When you say “with less people” did you just give multiple peoples’ workloads to a single dev or did the devs you retained ask for more work?

What do you use an llm for in the ERP space?

Why would clients use you if they could just use the llm?

[anonzzzies]

> Do you consider yourself a “developer”? What is your title at said company?

Yes , for the past 40 years. And CTO/co-founder.

> Do you write code for yourself or for this business?

I have been writing DSL, code generators and other tooling for the past around 20 years for this company. Before that I did the same thing for educational software (also my company).

> Who determined and what criteria define who “cannot be a client facing consultant”?

They did; some people just don't like sitting with clients noting down very dry formulae and business rules.

> What is an “in house builder”?

Our in-house tooling which uses AI to create the software.

> What were these “fulltime devs” that you said “you don’t need anymore” doing before these llms?

Building LoB apps, bugifxing, maintaining, translating Excel or business rules to (Java) code.

> Do your customers know you swapped from human workers to llms? Are they comfortable with this transition?

Yes, they like it; faster (sometimes immediate results) and easier to track; no black box; just people sitting next to you.

> How did this change result in “much higher profit margins”?

Very high fees for these consultants but now they do 'all the work'; in total they make more hours than they did before, however much less than they did as programmers. But the fees are such a multiply that the end result is larger profits.

> When you say “with less people” did you just give multiple peoples’ workloads to a single dev or did the devs you retained ask for more work?

Yes, 1 consultant now does that work and can manage more.

> What do you use an llm for in the ERP space?

Feed it specs which get translated to software. This is not the type of 'he mate, get me a logistics system in german'; the specs are detailed and in the technical format we also use to write code ourselves the past 20+ years.

> Why would clients use you if they could just use the llm?

See above, we have a lot of know-how and code built in. That's why we cannot really sell this product either as no-one will get useful stuff out of it without training.

[joblemblem]

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

It sounds like you already had 20+ years of human made tooling already built and you use the llm to orchestration and onboarding.(?)

I’m glad you found a solution that works for you.

I could see that use case.

When I did consulting work the initial onboarding of new clients to my tooling was a lot drudge work, but I definitely felt my job was more about the work after that phase of satisfying requests for additional features, and updating out of date methods and technologies.

I wonder what your plans are for when your tools fall out of date or fail to satisfy some new normal?

Hire ”seasonal” programmers again? Or have an llm try to build analogues to what your developers built those precious 20+ years?

(‘precious’ was a typo of ‘previous’ but I left it in because I thought it was funny)

[anonzzzies]

Well, it's one of my businesses so I will probably sell it. I have others which I like a lot more and they have more staying power (and are less bothered by AI, although it helps, but not enough yet; my favorite business is a business which does very urgent emergency software repairs: the current LLMs are way too hallucinatory for that ; it's wasting too much time and really solid tooling I haven't managed to build around it; you cannot imagine how terrible, and therefor unique/diverse, software around the world is).