[xivzgrev]

There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs".

And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful?

Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform?

I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now accountable for 3 person's jobs. And people are naturally uncomfortable with that - you need to understand what's going on and be able to investigate / fix. It's different than say, weaving machines replacing jobs because weaving machines were consistent. 1 person could confidently produce what x weavers could before. But AI is not, and that variability in output & quality introduces massive friction.

So as of now, in both software and people, there's a real limit to how much AI can replace because the remaining people still are equally accountable.

[hbarka]

Vendor lock-in is real and it’s scary. You are helpless to the constant price increases and each passing renewal you get deeper and deeper into the lock-in. Here’s to the day when someone clever with AI can disintermediate this situation. You don’t have to vibecode your own CRM but imagine a deterministic harness that lets you lego-block CRM functions like lead management, opportunity tracking, contact list, campaigns. There shouldn’t be a moat anymore.

[crisnoble]

Moving the vendor lock-in to the AI provider and exponentially increasing the pain of migration by locking all teams and all services in at once.

[hbarka]

Not really. Mixture of models and mixture of experts have been around. It’s easy to switch a project harness from Codex to Claude to Gemini and to open models. You’re not locked in to a model, you’re more concerned about competitive token cost.

[52-6F-62]

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