Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?
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jjc_811 about 4 hours ago 34 comments
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This is something I’ve been turning over in my head lately. I’m not denying AI is being used everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually helping businesses overall. If we shut it all down it seems that businesses would be fine (and maybe even better since there’d be no token burning budgets).
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But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.
Related to code quality, I've noticed developers picking up tricks from AI. Like using feature/xxxxx as the branch name. Last year exactly zero developers used this convention. If any used paths in their branches, it was almost certainly their name. Now everyone uses this convention. Though, they do use correct capitalization instead of lowercase freaking _everything_ that AI does.
TF at least gave a nice folder view on the branches screen, which we've lost now we've moved to GitHub, but it has made it easier to enforce.
The AI learned it from somewhere though, it didn't come up with it on its own
Most just use Gemini or ChatGPT.
What does Anthropic bring to the table? Nothing, just a “me too” company
LLMs are a cool tool but we’re over-encouraging use in every domain, even tasks they’re not good at. Every tech company in the world seems to be getting rich though how can I possibly say things would be better without it?
However if everyone else stopped using AI we would be broke, so please don't do that.
That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain.
Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out.
It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".
I could theoretically maintain my output, yes.
Practically nope, not because I can't do the work without AI, as much as because of burnout - both from technical (Ansible, Python - neither are a thing I like using) and social (dealing with corpospeak) reasons.
Other than that, interacting with my boss would become less stupid (or at least be his own variety of it instead of ChatGPT's variety of stupid) and nothing meaningful would change.
Everyone who's saying that they wouldn't get anything done at all, you're already doomed and I can't wait to watch the collapse after this crap has ruined so much.
I've got all kinds of useful tools that do helpful things, like check to make sure Amazon hasn't lost a bunch of my inventory or suddenly deindexed my product from search. These sorts of things happen without warning from time to time and are trivially fixable if you catch them, but you have to be constantly monitoring 10 different things to catch anything that could go wrong in a timely fashion.
I've similarly got an inventory/cashflow management system that's deterministic that would be fine, but some of my other tools, like one that scrapes my Alibaba/WeChat/Whatsapp/Gmail supplier convos to keep my order status board updated, is finicky. I wouldn't be able to repair that once it broke.
For some tasks, I'd have to go back to freelancers. At this point, when I take over a new brand and want to refresh images or want to A/B test new ones with an existing brand, I can do that entirely with image gen. No AI would just send me back to Upwork.
For other tasks, I'd just have to do them myself. Right now when I acquire a brand, I have a Claude skill that runs through all of the Amazon search and ads reports to find the key search terms, analyzes the text of the listing and proposes updates to make sure we're hitting the ones that matter. I used to do that myself, but it takes somewhere between 2-10 hours depending how many products we're talking about.
The biggest loss would be the inability to expand. I started out just buying Amazon-only brands because Amazon provides a crazy amount of infrastructure that enables me to run a lot of them by myself. My most recent acquisition came with a Shopify site that had minimal sales plus a Meta ad account the guy who sold me the brand had done a little experimentation with. A year ago, I would've just discarded those, since my time is the biggest bottleneck. It takes a lot of time to run your own site and Meta ads, so it makes more sense for me not to bother and instead just make more Amazon-only acquisitions.
But now I'm having a great time really pushing Claude and ChatGPT to do most of the work. I redesigned the site more or less by just having ChatGPT do research on competitors and best practices, then having Claude run with that. That took maybe eight total hours of work.
I'm spinning up an enormous amount of creative to test on Meta, and I had ChatGPT research and spec all of the kinds of landing pages that are worth trying. Claude implemented them and set up the ads using Meta's ads APIs. I got all of that done yesterday.
So yeah, basically if I couldn't use AI any more, I'd get back to the original thesis of my business, which is buying small brands at reasonable prices and operating them as leanly as possible. It still works, but it'd be a lot less fun and profitable.