ALL PROGRAMMERS and VIBE CODERS use AI against itself ... vibe code systems that forces AI to pay all of us humans for our content! Without our content AI is irrelevant! Why are we giving our content/souls to it freely now so it thrives and we do not??
Well, Twitter isn't worth much, or at least not what Elon paid for it in 2022, it just carries on like a zombie under a different name and investors got bailed out by being rolled into xAI and then the SpaceX IPO.
Though your point that Twitter's value was never in the code stands.
IDK. The internet is full of examples of platform max exodus's. This may actually be a killer idea that will finally challenge the tech oligarchy power. I think we are in for a turbulent future. The FANNG/MANGO companies have essentially never had any real challenge to their dominace. We are about to enter an era where they will be challenged for the first time. I don't think they will be nice about it and we will see their true non altruistic colors. Especially Google and Apple which have lost their halos but are still considered "good actors" by many.
Somewhat fitting that we just got the Backrooms movie which is about making Uncanny Valley copies of locations (and people) and here we have Uncanny Valley copies of software...
My point is, if you are going to use terminology then use terminology correctly. The signal to noise ratio on HN is already bad enough as it is.
Implementation Consulting is always a separate practice under a seprate set of partners and leadership from Strategy Consulting.
Also, BAH doesn't really do Management Consulting anymore.
What Bain is doing is basically testing whether the valuation of acquisition targets actually makes sense or not, which is different from what you are talking about.
Anything substantially new will still require an engineer in the loop. Specifically, if a new design pattern, archtecture, etc is required. AI can only build on its training material - it can't yet have original thoughts.
Big management consulting firms real value prop is two-fold 1) (value to it's employees) networking for the corporate leadership class when young and 2) (value to outside companies) blame insurance, you can always blame them for why something didn't work
> It has always been overpriced and had huge margins.
This is the engineer’s take on things. I am entirely sympathetic to it.
I also think it missed a lot of what management values in consulting. At its best, you can offload a lot of things unrelated to your business to people who are experts. At its worst, you’ve offloaded the blame to a group of over-worked twenty-something’s with impressive degrees who have no idea what they’re doing, but who sound really fucking confident about it.
Can an internal team do it better? Probably. Will they be cheaper? Probably. Will they assuage management’s anxieties and deflect some/all of the blame? Nope, not at all.
I did some software consulting years ago. Were we overpriced? Probably. But I also saw why we were brought in:
- A TDD loop where the Indian QA team played the role of the tests. The engineers would yeet some broken code at the end of the day, the poor QA testers would click through all the broken interfaces, and then the engineers would fix it the next day.
- A release process that was so slow and hellish that everyone just went to the DBA to have him add a stored procedure to implement their feature. He could get it in for you the next day.
- A frontend framework discussed in hushed tones, being built by a mysterious monk-like engineer, which was going to be the client's big secret weapon. In reality it was a terrible version of React built on top of jQuery.
- A core in-group of backend devs (most of these guys had advanced degrees for some reason), who would stay late every Friday, going through heroics to do a release of the client's email-templating app. There would be then be lots of back-slapping and congratulations the next Monday for these geniuses who were keeping the business afloat.
- "when in doubt, set timeout". They didn't know about callbacks
Usually consultants are brought in when upper management can tell that there is something very wrong and they can't fix it within the chain of command of their full-time staff.
Ah yes, the old trope of "consultants are only there to take the blame". Sure.
Having done a stint in consulting, most internal software teams are useless, that's why these companies hire outsiders. They are sick of having to deal with stubborn teams who think they know everything, and refuse to change. You can see that mentality in these threads.
the ease of making a prototype is not at all related to the ease of productising/releasing/bringing to market and that, in turn, is not at all related to the ease of maintenence/maturization/scaling.
You didn't even want the same kind of guy or team doing each one before ai. Turns out, AI is great at prototyping, ok at productizing and terrible at maintenence and scaling
The point about prototyping and vibecoding in this manner is to wargame and think about workflows and whether or not they are defensible.
A product where the secret sauce is basically a distribution play is going to need a different strategy and demand a different valuation compared to a product where the platform itself is successfully monetizing on a workflow.
I mean, this is just basic smart investing today. Software is now very easily replicable, and you wouldn't want to invest in software that has absolutely no moat.
At a minimum, this gives Bain more leverage when negotiating with these companies.
Do you mean by AI? I haven't seen any evidence of this.
It was always possible to get code generated at large volumes for low cost (offshore/outsource market) but we didn't see this upend or replace many (if any) software companies. In my experience it had the opposite effect - companies that replaced talented internal teams ended up suffering.
LLM generated code is similar, but arguably more expensive and lower quality.
We don't see LLM generated product replacement at scale because code generation is a problem, but it's not the only problem. Low quality can kill a product, but high quality doesn't guarantee success.
There's an entire ecosystem around a successful software offering. An ecosystem that depends on adequately functioning code.
LLMs may be useful for certain tasks (...maybe... - we've always had good options for repetitive code generation) but I certainly wouldn't describe it as "very easily replicable".
Very good idea. For every company that is valuable because of software + knowledge + service + loyal customers there are a dozen that only exist because of weak competition and inertia.
Easy to imagine there are a lot of software products that could be cloned and out-competed by taking 15% profit margin instead of 50%.