Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We replaced Zendesk

tradecore.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 102 posts

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#71

Post by AndrewKemendo »

ale wrote: post #59
mattmanser wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s not a 180

It’s measuring time to iterate/ship, cost reduction and independence, which is really all that matters

Reusable was great because it used to be the fastest. The fastest now is vibe/slop > iterate > iterate > iterate > ship > iterate > ship etc…

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#72

Post by AndrewKemendo »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #43
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #11

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…

> if I can spend a week replicating your software that has all these bullshit dark pattern features and I can replicate that for my own why why wouldn’t I? Have fun Chesterton's fencing yourself into much of what other companies spent years learning and solving. Prototypes and proofs of concept were easy even before AI.

I’m well aware

Which is why you start from the principles that were “learned and solved” in the past.

Literally none of those things that you’re talking about Chestertons fence hopping are secrets or hidden

They’re very well documented in product design, project management, cybernetics, IT etc…

There’s been thousands and thousands of articles written about all the different ways to build: functional programming, monorepo vs micro services, strong typed, memsafe etc….

there’s infinite number of framework debates that are already embedded in the LLMs that you simply need to interrogate as part of the planning process before you ship anything

It’s actually really simple.

The reality is that 99% of software engineers never gave care about any of that ever. Go ask your average software engineer about Parness information hiding or Conway law inversions.

These things are trivially easy to grasp and make engineering intuitively simple to avoid MOST problems. I am consistently teaching principal engineers, VP, senior software engineers, people who know how to write code about basic basic basic information theory. It’s honestly embarrassing.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#73

Post by acejam »

faangguyindia wrote: post #60
firefoxd wrote: post #48

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 blazin…

Would love to see what that Intercom replacement looks like! :)

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#74

Post by AndrewKemendo »

bigblind wrote: post #27
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #11

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…

I'm curious whether people feel like UX could at all be a differentiator here. like, sure, i can build a very quick crud app with Ai in an hour, but there are lots of UX decisions that, if not prompted in the right direction, AI just handles badly. i guess the problem is that once a teamp goes through the process of figuring out good UX for a certain flow, which can take time, that UX then becomes trivial to copy.

Every product reveals its design if you know how to interrogate it.

So knowing a software architecture for something you use is the HARDEST part to observe and the UX is the easiest to observe.

provided you can describe what you observe, and your desired workflow that matches your need, then you can replicate it provided you understand how to test and iterate, which again is trivial to learn.

Combine:

Observations of workflows to implement and

Notional data architecture

You can create a slimmed down version of pretty much anything.

I mean this is basically every image editor compared to Photoshop.

A designer that is used to all the features Photoshop has, and then you just use the most common workflows that most people use, to be the feature bootstrap for your Photoshop alternative that’s much lighter weight and cheaper etc.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#75

Post by macspoofing »

eloisant wrote: post #65
firefoxd wrote: post #48

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 know you had commercial arguments when working at Zendesk. Still: when you code your own solution, you don't need to build an integration with every single platform you can think of. Just those you use. And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.

>And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.

Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#76

Post by rdsubhas »

firefoxd wrote: post #48

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 know this is a AI generated post, talking about an AI generated app. So next I'm expecting the AI agent deleted our prod database posts.

This is like the new racism, just call something that you don't like or want to denigrade as "AI". It works on both sides, both AI lovers and AI haters.

If only you cared to read the article.

A human spent time writing it, they gave two purposefully narrow commitments that if someone care to read the article, you'd know comes from a human.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#77

Post by 827a »

Companies that are brave enough to do this; or more importantly, those that have aligned their internal processes and infrastructure around an ability to do this; will own the future.

The scary part for some existing companies is that the situation is very rarely "oh you could have chosen to be more forward-thinking and you just didn't". Many companies just don't have the expertise, infrastructure, processes, or authority to do this. If you don't, you don't, and for you, Zendesk will be a better option, for as long as you're able. Its natural selection.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#78

Post by Ethee »

macspoofing wrote: post #75
eloisant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you had commercial arguments when working at Zendesk. Still: when you code your own solution, you don't need to build an integration with every single platform you can think of. Just those you use. And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible.

>And sometimes, especially now with AI, coding your own solution exactly tailored to your needs can be simpler than configuring a complex product designed to match as many use case as possible. Coding a solution was never a problem. Supporting and maintaining it was. I can guarantee you an in-house ticketing system will be more expensive than Zendesk for every small and medium company.

I feel like this is the biggest disconnect I'm seeing with the new AI trend. Supporting something is infinitely times easier than building it and typically requires a different group of people, but the simple fact that I can build a thing that works, by myself, in 48 hours with very little opportunity cost is insane and feels so understated here.

What would it have taken to get this off the ground before? A ton of meetings with stakeholders to decide if this is even a good idea. Meetings with other developers who touch systems you might understand but have never used before yourself. And WAAAY longer than 48 hours to get an MVP prototype off the ground.

It's a little ironic to me that we constantly shit on how broken something underneath the hood is here despite the fact that it works, while in the same breath complaining about the enshitification of products that have been garbage long before AI came along. I'm not going to disagree that vibecoding spits out a lot of garbage, but we're already swimming in garbage so what does it matter?

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#79

Post by taldo »

faangguyindia wrote: post #60
firefoxd wrote: post #48

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 blazin…

Also replacing Intercom right now. Their pricing just doesn't make sense for us.

Re: We replaced Zendesk

#80

Post by jmull »

A key point to their success, highlighted in the article:

They had a strong understanding of exactly what zendesk was doing for them and how it integrated with their other stuff.

People hoping to do something similar should try to put themselves in a similar situation.

Post reply on HN