[wjnc]

I’m in Finance and learned pretty quickly that to point out the implicit future cost raises based on the cost the LLM-providers need to recoup was unpopular at best (STFU better describes the situation). Running full force into a bear trap.

[noduerme]

I've seen that mentality and gone to bat to convince a boardroom that it's the wrong approach, when people were star-struck by the possibilities. Luckily I'm in a position as CTO of a (very non-tech, brick and mortar) company that entrusts me to manage their budget for new features, and prevent erosion of our software/logistics over the long term. And I've come down decidedly on the side of not having LLMs fuck with any schema or architecture changes or anything in the codebase that would touch upon business logic. When your code actually encapsulates business logic, which is often counterintuitive and full of weird exceptions, 90% of the code work is done by prior planning to map out all possible branches and the algorithms to assist employee decision making. The 10% that's actually writing code needs to be done by someone who understands the entire stack and business model perfectly. Some nice HTML/CSS fluff here and there is great to hand off to an LLM, and you don't need frontier models for that.

I shot down similar arguments in favor of outsourcing overseas for years. Outsourcing any critical logic to an LLM is even worse.

[bob1029]

> I shot down similar arguments in favor of outsourcing overseas for years. Outsourcing any critical logic to an LLM is even worse.

Outsourcing to another continent of humans and supplementing workflows with LLMs are entirely different operational universes. I think it is fair to put them on the same spectrum, but they're really far apart.

I'd argue outsourcing is a far more aggressive abdication of ownership of the technology than bringing an LLM agent in house and having it light a few fires under a few asses.

[noduerme]

Other than the delay time, I'm not sure I see the difference. You're removing your primary from the job of writing code, putting them into an editorial role, which removes responsibility and agency and actual hands-on understanding. The quality of the code is beside the point. More friction (language barriers, time zone difference) is actually better if you want to maintain institutional knowledge, because it requires more intellectual engagement. Accepting the LLM answer is too easy and leads to a decay of the systems knowledge and of the thought process.

[edit] as the sibling points out, decayed system knowledge leads to relying on the LLM to fix the bugs the LLM introduced, which causes further decay in the institutional ability to reason with the business logic in code.

[someguyiguess]

I reject the premise that using LLMs absolutely leads to loss of institutional knowledge. It is trivial for an LLM to generate a knowledge base of any kind in any language which can answer any question about your institution at any time. How is a bunch of fragmented humans with limited knowledge who can’t all communicate with each other better than that?

[rglullis]

Do you seriously think that "institutional knowledge" can be maintained by simply writing down a few pages on Confluence or whatever system your company uses for internal documentation?

[noduerme]

Have you ever taken the time to read hundreds of pages of documentation to fully understand a massive codebase? Neither have I. You learn it by working with it all day, and you're careful with it. A complete "knowledge base" of business logic is, itself, indistinguishable from code. Code that no one can or will read and learn unless they have to be immersed in it.

So the "knowledge base" an LLM generates is not useful as code, nor is it useful to humans. It may be useful to other LLMs as a lossy compression scheme for the original intention of the business logic and code.

That's not even in the same universe as institutional knowledge. Handing any serious business to something like that is malpractice, and sloppy beyond belief.

I'm not surprised that a lot of people think this way, because they never really grasped the benefit of holistic business knowledge united with code to begin with. Those people always outsourced, always got shitty code, and never really unified their systems. Cheap people and cheap companies take cheap exits. That's fine. But yes, many fragmented humans who all understand their portion in depth is much better than a bunch of markup files at retaining the knowledge of why things are done, procedurally, the way they are.

Once every six months the CEO calls me and asks me to remind him why our software does something like, idk, create a reverse payment instead of voiding a charge in some situation. Or some other thing he has asked a dozen times before. And I know the answer to why, or I know where to look, because I was in those meetings 5 years ago or because I wrote the code myself and asked the question when I wrote it.

Institutional knowledge is a very large context window, if you need to think of it that way, and LLMs are a shitty compression method for that. They can tell you how, but they don't reason well with why.

[Xmd5a]

> create a reverse payment instead of voiding a charge

I think I know the reason to this one. Maybe. Because the money is already gone! There are no rollbacks in the banking system only "counter"-transactions.

[somenameforme]

If you're not being sarcastic, you answered your own question. LLMs can absolutely do whatever you tell them to, which rapidly leads to the creation of a dependency if you begin building upon that as an assumption.

I've, for better or for worse, jumped full-on in with LLMs, and I can already feel my abilities radically declining over time. That's fine by me, but if you're a company looking to protect your institutional advantage - just handing over everything to an LLM suddenly means anybody can do exactly what you're doing, literally. At best and this is an absolute best case scenario, you're transferring your advantage to the stewardship of another company.

[alfiedotwtf]

I can imagine boardrooms everywhere asking LLMs what’s the most successful way to make money, and overnight every company pivots to gambling, tobacco, and porn.

[alfiedotwtf]

I guess that all depends on how much your company revolves around Minecraft

[jddj]

It can be as similar to or as far from outsourcing as you allow it to be.

The "if AI code breaks, who will fix it? -> "AI will fix it" exchange has (anecdotally) been very common among executives, which is much closer to outsourcing than programming.

[wjnc]

No need for the downvotes imho. Can’t speak for u/noduerme but in putting outsourcing (labor, LLM/AI) in the same basket I don’t see a category mistake, but a dry way of looking at business. What are the risks, what are the rewards, what future skills are we at risk of losing (the business logic part) if we go in direction XYZ.

Something completely different (but with the same logic): do you outsource legal, hire your own team of business lawyers or will you let customer services use AI for legal problems (and only hire a lawyer for a day in court)? I think all three solutions are currently active in different firms. From a risk perspective I would always want a lawyer on my team. Insource those learnings. But perspectives vary.

[noduerme]

Not sure if you were asking me, but the company I'm CTO of has in-house legal counsel, even though it's not a huge company. Their decision to keep software and also marketing/branding and art direction in-house for the past 20 years has followed the same logic. [which is to say: When they began as a single shop, the first thing they did was bring on legal]. I think it's a smart way of doing things. It's certainly a lot cheaper, and it earns more loyalty and commitment.

Moreover, any of us can run essential questions by each other, the marketing director, the lawyer, the CEO, the GM. And everyone has a stake. So all the creative and business decisions are worked out pretty quickly, and new features roll out with everything vetted and in place.

[mdgld]

since when did HN have downvotes?

[kdbg]

Its one of the features that is behind a minimum karma requirement.

https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented/blob/m...

[alfiedotwtf]

You know… up until your comment I’ve never even considered there are companies right now outsourcing overseas to people who will just vibecode it for a quick buck, my those companies live in interesting times

[Der_Einzige]

This is wrong. Token costs for the same model rapidly collapse over a year. Hardware inflation is a thing but not bad enough to outweigh the massive impact of software optimizations.

Tokens billed at API prices are profitable for openAI and anthropic today and it only get more lucrative every month for them as their inference costs fall. If it weren’t for continuous massive training runs taking larger and larger capex, these companies would be massively profitable

[derdi]

> Tokens billed at API prices are profitable for openAI and anthropic today

That's nice for them. What's less nice for them is that big customers are figuring out (some faster, some more slowly) that they don't want to pay API prices, or at least only for a much smaller number of tokens.

[OtomotO]

The sad part is that you work in FINANCE of all things and this happens there.

Like: What competence do decision makers in FINANCE have, when they are this oblivious to economics?

[wjnc]

Look, I share your sentiment. But, I can relate to the C-squad though. Going squarely against the market sentiment is not the way to gain and keep confidence. And everyone is vibing right? So they are probably thinking something like: as long as the spent is < few percent of a years profit, we can always adjust direction in the future and at least we’ve bet the same horse as the rest. “Those penny pinchers in finance (:: me) don’t get the big picture.”

[noduerme]

>> Going squarely against the market sentiment is not the way to gain and keep confidence

I don't think this is axiomatic. I usually invest my time, energy and money in things that go squarely against the market's momentary sentiment.

[noduerme]

A better question would be how anyone who thinks about economic fundamentals could get a job in finance (or stay in it).

[no offense intended to the parent post, I'm on their side]