It's lowering the bar for developers to enter the marketplace, in a space that is wildly under saturated. We'll all be fine. There's tons of software to be built.
More small businesses will be able to punch-up with LLMs tearing down walled gardens that were reserved for those with capital to spend on lawyers, consultants and software engineering excellence.
It's doing the same thing as StackOverflow -- hard problems aren't going away, they're becoming more esoteric.
If you're at the edge, you're not going anywhere.
If you're in the middle, you're going to have a lot more opportunities because your throughput should jump significantly so your ROI for mom and pop shops finally pencils.
Just be sure you actually ship and you'll be fine.
Honestly, I've developers saying the same thing about IDEs and high level languages.
This new generation of tools add efficiency the same way IntelliJ added efficiency on top of Eclipse which added efficiency on top of Emacs/VI/Notepad/etc.
The more time that someone can focus on the systemsit takes certain types of high-time, [not domain problem specific] skill processes and obfuscated it away so the developer can focus on the most critical aspects of the software.
Yes, sometimes generators do the wrong thing, but it's usually obvious/quick to correct.
Cost of occasional correction is much less than the time to scaffold every punchcard.
Don’t build it to sell - explicitly. Build it to solve your business problem and tell the guy building it “after we’ve separated ourselves from our competitors and we’ll either declare our company a software company that does logistics, or we’ll set an environment for you to pitch the sale of the software to competitors”
A startup mindset is importantly for the first hires, but selling software is an aspiration not a requirement.
That aspiration can be distracting from simpler business problem solving solutions too, so be clear “new codebase” when we are ready to sell…
Shortcuts for us, no shortcuts on the software resell company.
Third this. If the software team (at least the lead) does not know the business requirements, you are not doing in-house development. Otherwise, it is just equivalent to off shore development, that happens to sit in the same building as yourself.
> I have a fully staffed team it’s not 5m a year. For a company twice his size.
I don't think the numbers OP chose really matter. The point is to do the exercise. Try and work out some numbers on how much the current software is costing, how much room there is for improvement and how much investment it will take to get there. Add a big margin to account for all the uncertainty with building something out.
If the numbers still work out significantly in favour of writing your own software then it may be a project worth considering.
Depending on the area of logistics OP is in, it's not unlikely that he'd need on-call engineers for his logistics management system. Blockages in supply chain can be extremely expensive.
Sure; but eventually you've got a bus number problem and a "I want to be able to take a vacation and I want my coworkers to be able to take a vacation" problem, and that requires more people.
My caution is at the end of working with free lancers you have no technical retention.
My company worked with freelancers/consultants for years, it just delayed the inevitable. You need to start building your in house team.
Find the ONE. See if he can build anything on their own. If they can/thinking is good, then scaling with freelancers seems good because you retain knowledge and long-term vision/oversight.
That's the whole point - at this point they don't know if they want to build out a full team. Start small and measure progress, you can always add permanent employees along the way. (We did this too)
I started as a “programmer” for a similar sized company, we’ve 2.5x and I’m the CTO now.
I can share a great deal of input if you would like to chat sometime, message me/I’ll make a point to check tomorrow.
Quick notes
* projects that add structure to data, but remain flexible to manual overrides are the most successful + fit logistics.
* full automation is almost never possible. You can automate PIECES of the puzzle, but focus on building software for humans.
* Broadly skilled technical jackrabbits are what you want. Fullstack Developer with great data modeling skills/dangerous with SQL (can DBA, can optimize queries, designing for future analysts)
If you can find a unicorn, that wants to be a #1 and take on the challenge - grab and grow organically. Don’t throw bodies and money at it.
Let them learn the business/bring them to meet everyone and see their processes and - if he’s good - he’ll find small improvements on existing systems/processes that help stabilize the sanity while he continies noodling the big picture.
The big picture will take time / start small and see if you like the results before going two feet in and handing over operations to them.
Attracting talent is easy for #1 show them the size of the company and potential opportunity.
The right person has a long-view in mind and so long as they’re successful, keep them happy and the rest takes care of itself.
More small businesses will be able to punch-up with LLMs tearing down walled gardens that were reserved for those with capital to spend on lawyers, consultants and software engineering excellence.
It's doing the same thing as StackOverflow -- hard problems aren't going away, they're becoming more esoteric.
If you're at the edge, you're not going anywhere.
If you're in the middle, you're going to have a lot more opportunities because your throughput should jump significantly so your ROI for mom and pop shops finally pencils.
Just be sure you actually ship and you'll be fine.