| > 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. |
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)