> Organizations are using agentic coding tools to build software in-house in lieu of purchasing it. Nearly a third of respondents (32 percent) report that their organizations have decided against buying one or more software products or features because they could be built internally with agentic coding tools.<p>People think they can do it themself... kind of like how everyone build their own database using Microsoft Access in the 90's. When all software developers needed to repair all the issues...
We can do it ourselves. Simple custom tools are so much more effective than a conglomeration of general purpose ones. I've been ripping out SaaS offerings left and right, it's great.
I am at a point in my career where I'm figuring out where I want to spend the last 15 years of it. I don't want to work in corporate for a long stretch of it. It seems to me, being a consultant to fix all those messes could be a good seam of code face to get stuck into...
Except that isn't how it played out. Most of the Access DBs, spreadsheets, and even SharePoint, Notes, and early Salesforce apps worked just fine without any help from devs. Yes, the devs got called in when those solutions needed to scale beyond a single department, but most of them never did.<p>It is far more plausible that we'll see that pattern again - small, department-level vibe coded apps will be around. And things that need to scale bigger will need professionals.
The ROÍ will be happening any day now, we promise. Please hire more McKinsey consultants who say they’re AI experts.
This McKinsey? <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-a...</a>
Do I understand correctly that means there is no AI ROI to show off yet? If correct that’s pretty bad, no?
<i>Directionally</i>, we'll have ROI by 2100 if we build 1000x more data centers. Growth mindset!
There’s a concept of an ROI
For the internet in many cases it took a decade or longer too, no?
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox</a>
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i look forward to mckinsey being replaced by ai.
I wouldn't trust anything McKinsey publishes.
As expected the thread is filled with smug comments on how it is definitely not ROI positive.<p>The thing I think about is AI is already at that spot where you don’t need a survey or a Randomised Controlled Trial to prove it makes one productive. Sometimes things are that obvious. But these kind of tests and surveys appeal to a certain kind of person who considers IMO the wrong type of things as rigorous.
It makes organizations more productive at producing code and doing other tasks, but translating that into something that affects PnL is different. Where I work it's sped up individual tasks I've worked on but I don't think it's sped up delivery timelines of any of the major projects I'm involved in. We just added additional verification work with the extra cycles the engineers have now. It's not like that work is useless. It will probably mean I have less debugging to do in the future, but when you look at how the business makes money I don't see it making a big impact.