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.

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.

That adopted mentality pays off tech debt fast.

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.

Great advice IMO.

Great approach advice IMO.

That said, my feeling is the guy doesn’t have a prebuilt fit for his company / he’s already shopped extensively.

Nothing off the shelf does that.

Integration is where cross departmental solutions live and that’s an underrated nightmare

These are very generous consultant pitch #s not reality. We doubled running 1-$200k/guy … 2x full stack devs (me) 2x data guys 1x MSP for IT.

That team was awesome and did serious buzz saw damage because we shipped solutions that made the company better every day.

Didn’t have to be huge. Just help someone do something better.

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.

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.

Hard to leave an institution like that

That said, I use that natural key as the "link" to my internally managed, normalized database.

There's nothing that says I cannot add unique identifiers that would replicate the natural key. In fact, that's good design.

There's a false equivalency drawn between writing tests means you wrote good code. In reality, those who can write good tests can also write good code.

My rules of thumb: "Be a goldfish" - Forget everything you know about your project, is it complicated, non-intuitive? Tests + clear documentation.

But don't test for stupid stuff.

AI's already generate+test the stupid stuff for us anyway ... why are we writing it

Are they someone that's going to disrupt your team's focus on product and execution. No? Cool.

Officers handled it well.

There

We sadly let someone walk because while they were SUPER talented, they weren’t working effectively on things that mattered