In my experience this isn’t the case. SaaS systems, at the least the ones that are embracing this sea change seem to recognize that connectivity is key. They are opening APIs and partnering like we’ve never seen. They lack the domain expertise and resources to plumb the last mile. Companies can finally customize and integrate there core SORs at a reasonable price point and if you hire the right people decent technology. It’s a golden era, I do wonder if you’re correct medium/long term but the lack of skill sets to build, deploy, and maintain these solutions is very real. Many can vibe code a great looking app, very few can support it day two even for just a few hundred users.
Lowering the bar to integrate and communicate is what has historically allowed technology to reach critical mass and enabled adoption. MCP is an evolution in that respect and shouldn’t be disregarded.
We had a non technical team member write an agent to clean up a file share. There are hundreds of programming languages, libraries, and apis that enabled that before MCP but now people don’t even have to think about it. Is it performant no, is it the “best” implementation absolutely not. Did it create enormous value in a novel way that was not possible with the resources, time, technology we had before 100%. And that’s the point.
>non technical team member write an agent to clean up a file share
This has to be BS(or you think its true) unless it was like 1000 files. In my entire career I've seen countless crazy file shares that are barely functional chaos. In nearly ever single "cleanup" attempt I've tried to get literally ANYONE from the relevant department to help with little success. That is just for ME to do the work FOR THEM. I just need context from them. I've on countless occasion had to go to senior management to force someone to simply sit with me for an hour to go over the schema they want to try to implement. SO I CAN DO IT FOR THEM and they don't want to do it and literally seemed incapable of doing so when forced to. COUNTLESS Times. This is how I know AI is being shilled HARD.
If this is true then I bet you anything in about 3-6 months you guys are going to be recovering this file system from backups. There is absolutely no way it was done correctly and no one has bothered to notice yet. I'll accept your downvote for now.
Cleaning up a file share is 50% politics, 20% updating procedures, 20% training and 10% technical. I've seen companies go code red and practically grind to a halt over a months long planned file share change. I've seen them rolled back after months of work. I've seen this fracture the files shares into insane duplication(or more) because despite the fact it was coordinated, senior managers did not as much as inform their department(but attended meetings and signed off on things) and now its too late to go back because some departments converted and some did not. I've seen helpdesk staff go home "sick" because they could not take the volume of calls and abuse from angry staff afterwards.
Yes I have trauma on this subject. I will walk out of a job before ever doing a file share reorg again.
We are in early stages of rolling out these capabilities to our team but we have aligned in VS Code + Cline + Sonnet 3.7. We use databricks but there’s a plugin for snowflake as well in vs code.
Couple of helpful tidbits we’ve learned:
- Define a read me that lays out your architecture. Normalization, libraries to use for different use cases, logging requirements, etc. reference it on every new task.
- keep notebooks from getting too big. A notebook per elt action or table definition make’s your compares faster and required context smaller.
Be prepared to be amazed. We’ve pointed Cline at an api doc and had it spit out elt code and a model that were nearly production ready. We’re pulling weeks off estimates…
I’d read that…I’d love to hear an Acquired podcast on the path of Long Distance Discount Services -> WorldCom -> MCI -> Verizon. They laid down a lot of fiber.
Curious how others feel about this narrative. As an SI we see the pain isolated systems cost businesses and the great deal of money required to make them fit into a larger ecosystem. That said as a rippling customer, their breadth and lack of depth is constantly on display. We’ve had several challenges with there “secondary” services. It costs money to be good at everything, my feeling is this style of getting off the ground is just as much a capital constraint as it is a revenue/gtm one.
He’s got a good valuation going selling ideas and figuring out how to implement later though…
I have worked for companies that chased breadth and companies that focused. The focused group contained the only real successes.
Breadth is a killer. It requires resources (eng, PM, executive) that are not available in young companies. Where it was pursued, the management imperative to build the broad set of capabilities without resourcing meant that almost everything sort of sucked. It was in one instance the result of a strong founder chasing every shiny buzzword even without a strong business justification.
Go with focus, unless you have proven-strong management and actual big-tech resourcing.
There are a couple of obvious problems with the breadth-first approach. While I think everyone would agree that a great platform beats a bunch of great one-function apps, building a great one-function app is much cheaper and less risky than trying to build a platform. The number of people who know some narrow problem they can solve better than existing solutions is exponentially greater than the number of people who know how to build a broad platform that solves most problems better than existing solutions. And the reality is that most companies who pay for platforms will still buy one-function apps if the platform's functionality is inferior enough to replace that aspect. They are much less likely to buy another entire platform, however.
I doubt Parker actually personally believes what he's saying here, it seems more like marketing from a company that is trying to sell a platform than it does the thoughtful opinion of an individual.
The comment on shortening resumes resonates deep. The ability to differentiate skill set is almost entirely distilled to a secondary search if you happen to spot the tiny 2003-2010 indicating more than a passing affair. Not that it’s confirmation of talent but when all you see is the same gpt fueled write ups regurgitating your job posting it is indeed harder to prioritize and suss out quality applicants. I see the newer generation of recruiters pushing for a 15 second resume review, so the problem is certainly on both sides but it certainly cultivates the continued downward spiral.
The clinicians themselves can be pretty dreadful. The uses being explored are to give coaching to them ahead of delivering news to help boost empathy and increase understanding. “It looks like you had a subdural hematoma cause a status epilepticus seizure” vs “that fall you took broke some blood vessels in your head which caused a longer seizure than we like to see”.
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