Comment by cottoneyejoe

I work in a large infrastructure design consultancy. There are massive unmet needs for narrow-purpose automation in project delivery that are being developed by the users that need them for a few pennies at a time. Previously, getting any project of any size done by the in-house developers required 6-24 months of alignment-building with multiple levels of management in multiple business units. Getting anything done comes with an administrative price tag in the $10,000s. Those people spent all their time on a few outward-facing products and building dashboards for EVPs and C-level people, and the people doing real work our customers actually care about are banging rocks together and fingerpainting walls of their caves with excel and email based workflow.

Now there are pockets of people who are extremely productive, and maybe 80-90% of the rest who will never adapt. When I mean extremely, I mean people producing weeks of effort of marketing teams and hundreds of unbillable hours of senior-level professionals with only a few minutes of human involvement. Paid software extensions for (awful) design software we are required by clients to use can all be duplicated in house. Technical leadership is now aware of this, and our spend on software licenses is going to drop fast. I think every project in my own portfolio has some kind of custom automation supporting it, which was unthinkable 5 years ago.

It's going to take years for practical knowledge of how to use these systems to spread and even more for market discipline to expel those who cannot or will not learn. The Industrial Revolution took nearly a century, depending on how you're counting. LLMs have only been producing coherent output in the last 5 years. They've only been as good or better than people at some things you would have done on a computer for about a year or so. Be patient. These are massive changes.