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by nicoburns 118 days ago
> If the choice is $2M/year with a 3-year minimum contract, or rolling your own, I think calculus really has shifted.

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.
3 comments
etothepii 118 days ago
This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything. It ends up feeling a lot like the engineer that wrote the code is still with you or documented everything very well. In the real world there is a risk that documentation is wrong or that the engineer misremembers some detail so even the occasional hallucination is not a particularly big risk.
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nicoburns 117 days ago
> This might be the biggest benefit of AI coding. If I have a large legacy code base I can use AI to ask questions and find out where certain things are happening. This benefit is huge even if I choose not to vibe code anything.

I definitely agree with this.

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xoz123 117 days ago
If you consider total cost of ownership including long-term maintenance costs, it means building has not always been cheaper than buying. I think what's changing is that it's now becoming dramatically cheaper to build AND operate AND maintain "good enough" bespoke software for a lot of use cases, at least in theory, below a certain threshold of complexity and criticality. Which seems likely to include a sizeable chunk of the existing SAAS market.

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.

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bensyverson 117 days ago
Oh I don't know, I think AI is very helpful at maintaining and modernizing legacy codebases. And in the old days, the "build" option was often not really cheaper once you factored in four salaries for developers to maintain the product. But now…
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