Comment by sixdimensional

Sorry to here about your bad experience. I do understand it, as when the hype cycle causes perfectly good things to be thrown away or messed up for no practical reason, it really bugs me too.

In this case, it's so easy for some to say everything else is bad if it is not AI, or you have to include AI "because it's the future".

I just wanted to clarify that I am very pragmatic in my approach to new tech and AI.

I used to work on enterprise ERP, MRP, sales and support systems (Oracle, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more)... not always by choice.

At one point a project came up to rebuild our core customer experience portal across our business. I got to build with the rule based chatbots to implement an assistant in that web app.

Not easy, but it worked well enough, especially for simple scenarios. For example, imagine a field support engineer being able to pull up the exact page in a big technical document for some obscure part by just asking for what they need, in seconds.

Or, being able to reorder some quantity of part by just asking for it, or checking the quantity of same.

These are time savers, especially if you have a voice to assistant interface too. So you can just type something, or ask for what you need without typing.

Tablets were common for manufacturing, inventory or service staff. Being able to pull up our interface and just say what they needed and get prompted for simple things - there were TONs of pragmatic small wins there.

Current LLM just make that easier than the old rigid rule based way we had to code those assistants (at the price of going wrong sometimes).

I care about efficiency, pleasant user experience, and pragmatics.. not AI for the sake of AI.

All that to say, if a drop down box works better for some use case, instead of AI - or even a rule based chatbot - hell yeah! Save on them tokens.