Comment by hn_acc1
7 days ago
After 30+ years in the software field, and a user for 40+, having at times heavily customized my desktop or editor, for example - I've concluded that the best thing for most apps is for me to learn to use them with stock settings.
Why? Inevitably, I changed positions / jobs / platforms, and all that effort was lost / inapplicable, and I had to relearn to use the stock settings anyway.
Now, I understand that some companies have different setups, but it might just make more sense to change the company's accounting procedures (if possible) to conform to most accounting software defaults, rather than invest heavily in modifying the setup, unless you're a huge conglomerate and can keep people on staff. Why? Because someone, somewhere will have to maintain those changes. Sure, you can then hire someone else to update those changes - but guess what? Most likely, unless they open-source their changes, no LLM will have seen those changes, and even if they are allowed to fine-tune on it, they'll have seen exactly ONE instance of these changes. Odds they'll get everything right, AND the person using the LLM will recognize when it doesn't go right? Oh right, they invested in hundreds of unit tests to ensure everything works as expected even with changes, and I'm the tooth fairy..
This just isn't true and will probably never be true. Using all the defaults is... probably optimal in the general sense and when things come to scale, but most companies (or just leadership) at some point want to leave the "standards" with custom design or additions. Also, any company providing payroll/accounting/ software has an inherent interest in going against standardization and providing features to promote lock-in.
There are good arguments to just conform. But it is in fact true nevertheless that many companies and teams continue to choose bespoke workflows over standardized ones. So I guess there must be something driving that.
I don't actually think this is going to take the form of LLMs implementing custom patches to off-the-shelf software. I think instead it's going to look like LLMs writing code that uses APIs offered by off-the-shelf software to script specific workflows.