Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you?

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.

And if I need to write a shell script that's good enough for a single one-off job, well, shell script is far from my native programming language, so it'll do a better job than I will

Please link to your history when you get one of these things to build my example so I can see how you managed to do it.

First, a friend without technical knowledge wanted to query an API using SQL. (At a previous firm he learned how to write “SELECT * FROM … WHERE …” statements.)

He asked one of these llms to do this, that he paid a premium for, and it suggested installing VSCode and writing an extension to ingest an API and to query it with python.

I am unfamiliar with VSCode so I’m unsure if this is even feasible, but after 3 days of trying to get it to work, he asked me, and I set up a python environment for him, and wrote a 5 line script to allow him to query the data ingested from the API into SQLite.

For me, the last time I tried, I asked one to write me a container solution using Docker that allowed for live coding of a Clojure project. I wanted it to give me solutions for each: deps.edn and lein.

I wasted hours, because it always felt “just around the corner”, trying to get it to output anything of use for either paradigm then when I abandoned the llm I quickly found, via a web search, a blog post someone wrote that did exactly what I asked, for a lein project of their own, and I just changed it to work for my project, and then again for the deps.edn version on my own.