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We replaced Zendesk

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51–60 of 102 posts

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#51

86% AI generated text. Seriously, does nobody write anymore?

No, it's just that people who were too lazy to write anymore than a paragraph can now paste that paragraph into a chatbox and get a full blogpost. The only issue is that it still contains only as much content as was in the single paragraph, the rest filler.

Actually LLMs are like the ultimate laziness enabler. But as people adjust their expectations this stuff will no longer look impressive, since people will know it's just AI slop, and the lazies will fade back into obscurity.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#53

Since their private equity buyout in 2022, Zendesk will absolutely attempt to get you to sign agregious terms. They will attempt to hoodwink you. They will pretend they never received your cancellations and charge you for another year of contract. Legal counsel should be leveraged when dealing with them to ensure you don't get screwed.

[dead]

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#55
post #37

86% AI generated text. Seriously, does nobody write anymore?

Great question! This is certainly a topic that touches on many important aspects of our modern world, and there are a lot of nuanced perspectives worth considering.

The problem — it's not that they don't write anymore; it's that they don't think anymore.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#56
If you have an internal CRM and are maintaining a Zendesk integration to create support tickets within your product, you've likely already done half the work needed to instead create those tickets in your own internal CRM tool yourself. This makes a lot of sense.

As someone who's had to maintain a Zendesk integration such as this for a large app it's hard to understate the benefit of having all that support info so close to the rest of your user's data. I have seen a huge amount of effort go into trying to get just the right balance of data in and out of ZD. Also helps alleviate concerns with sharing too much customer data with a third party.

This definitely isn't the right call for everyone, but there's a lot of upside if it can work for your organization.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#57

I have a friend who’s doing this for himself. He owns an AC business. He has need for tools but does not like plunking down money for a feature set that moves him in a direction he doesn’t wish to go. Solution? Create a bespoke internal system of one off apps for his OWN business using an LLM. He’s not a software developer, he has no concept of software maintenance or security. I’ve been watching and it’s interesting…

> Maybe business owners turned SWVibers like him will swing back to an off the shelf option once pouring more effort into 3am-my-stuff-is-broke scenarios becomes more of a chore than it’s worth.

I mean, that's what, as an industry, we're all desperately hoping for, but, well, shit. ChatGPT-5.5 is quite capable, so if the business owner is disciplined and prompts it with thought, I'm not so sure those greenfield projects are going to turn brown. Hell, if I was an AC business owner, would I rather pay a software startup who think they know the AC business, or pay another AC business owner to use the software they wrote?

"Your job isn't going to be taken by AI, it's going to be taken by someone using AI" -Jenson Huang

Problem is, that person using AI is from outside our field. (Not a problem for the AC business owner who has a new product to sell! Good on them, if they choose to go that route.)

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#58

86% AI generated text. Seriously, does nobody write anymore?

It sucks. The dumb diagrams as well - do we really need two boxes and an arrow to repeat what was described in a simple line of text just before?

Wow, yes, those are a pisstake. I hadn't seen them when reading the article because I used reader mode.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#59

This is precisely the future of consumer software engineering (no I’m not saying anything here about building robots rockets medicine etc. at least for the next decade probably) This idea that software developer productivity being the goal for AI companies is just not it - every piece of code you put into an LLM is a you giving these giant companies your expertise People need to remember where the bulk of engineering…

It really isn't. No-one wants to maintain these things, they'll be back on an out-sourced provider within 5 years, if they survive that long.

The devs doing these kinds projects no longer think of the code as maintainable, but disposable. It's quite the 180 for a community obsessed with reusable npm packages and not reinventing the wheel. Last year Cursor bragged about ditching their CMS in 3 days: https://x.com/leerob/status/1999513884382597485

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#60

From my understanding, they vibe coded a solution and for now it is working for them. I've worked with zendesk and several other platforms. I worked in customer service automation, so we had to deal with so many incompatibility with different platforms. This looks like a win for now, but the part we won't see is what happens at 72 hours. I'm all for sticking it to zendesk, but as I tell every single person who were t…

I've replaced Zendesk and Intercom with my custom solution built with Go and Sqlite.

It's in production for 4 months now.

I've not felt need for anything. We 2-3 custom integration built into it.

The only issue I had was spam. So I thought about adding turnstile but guess what? Cloudflare turnstile was giving me some error so I just added honey pot fields and didn't have any issue so far.

And also sqlite+go is blazingly fast, our agent love the speed.

It's running on $5-6 Hetzner server. Backups using Litestream to s3.

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