Comment by camgunz

I had the same experience (though I agree with other comments that the numbers are a little optimistic in terms of variance; I think there's a huge amount of variance in product work, you can't know what's a good investment until it's too late, many companies fail because of this, and there's huge survivorship bias in the ones that get lucky and don't initially fail). Slack spent tons of money in terms of product and engineering hours finding out what works and what doesn't. It's easy to copy/paste the thing after all that effort. Copy/paste doesn't get you to the next Slack though--it can get you to Microsoft's Slack-killing Teams strategy, but we obviously don't want more of that. And, obviously I agree with you about all the infra/maintenance costs, costs in stewarding API usage and extensions, etc. LLMs won't do any of that for you.