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Is the future of software really vibe coded by management consultants..?
It has always been overpriced and had huge margins.
I think what management consultants are really afraid of is being replaced. By AI.
Is the future of software really vibe coded by management consultants..?
Basic CRUD apps? Sure, why not. 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.
Is the future of software really vibe coded by management consultants..?
A quick addendum: The in-housed money furnace can produce material to reinforce and extend the foundations of information technology
Hard to see it'll help them much. There's so many other aspects to a successful software business vs just ease of build.
Customer already pay management consultancies for software - certainly BAH does a bunch of that here in DC (some .gov, some private sector).
Management/Strategy Consulting is different from Implementation Consulting (eg. BAH building and operating a .gov site).
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
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Customer already pay management consultancies for software - certainly BAH does a bunch of that here in DC (some .gov, some private sector).
> management consultancies for software... Management/Strategy Consulting is different from Implementation Consulting (eg. BAH building and operating a .gov site).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> management consultancies for software... Management/Strategy Consulting is different from Implementation Consulting (eg. BAH building and operating a .gov site).
Sure, and Bain, like BAH, has a software consulting practice. Many of the big consultancies do.
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.
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%.
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.
How?
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".