A non-technical friend of mine has just won some hospital contracts after vibecoding w/ Claude an inventory management solution for them. They gave him access to IT dept servers and he called me extremely lost on how to deploy (cant connect Claude to them) and also frustrated because the app has some sort of interesting data/state issues.
What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.
Those are custom software or heavily customized implementations of ERP and similar systems for very large organizations. I’m talking more about the SMB market where today it’s possible for a small team to carve out a niche and make a nice living or even bootstrap a venture that competes with a large player that has poor UX or antiquated feature designs.
The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.
>The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.
It's even simpler. Youre not paying oracle for some delapidated HR system. You're paying for the legion of accountability that is their on-site engineers to fix stuff for you when things screw up. You're essentially subscribing to a team of engineers you don't need to directly pay salary and benefits to.
People who think you can out efficiency that kind of accountability don't understand how large orgs think.
I used to gripe about various ERP companies but after having dealt with enough, yeah, that's just what the world of ERP systems is like. You will spend your time even with the best of them desiring to scream endlessly at everyone who works there. And they also know your pain but are powerless to help.
But the Torment Nexus is such an interesting technical challenge! and I don’t personally torment people: I just move protobufs around! - Software Engineer #1 and #2 excuses
> On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients
Or you end up with a certification process, which will of course introduce it's own problems but startups doing things the right way and not just "moveing fast and breaking things" can thrive.
As a SWE that has only ever worked for an employer or on his own projects, this makes me wonder: how would someone even get such a contract? Did this person already have a consulting business? Do you just call up random hospitals and ask if you can demo an inventory management system for them? Did this person already know people at the hospital? I know technical folks that do independent consulting, but even with a vibecoded product, how is it that anyone can just get such a contract?
People really have a misconception about the sums of money that companies operate on on a regular basis. If you are a people person and know essentially how to sell yourself, you can "scrape" money on the fact that nobody is going to look or think too hard about some contract that represents a tiny fraction of the years budget.
That still leaves the question of how one gets their foot in the door. Lots of us are aware of the budgets but we don't get how's sales work at that level.
That's what it means to be a "people person" in the context of trying to sell a product, yes. Getting within 2 degrees of a decision maker can open up millions for you, while being a rounding error for every company you work with.
This hospital will learn some hard lessons. I hope their backup strategy is good. I'm surprised they can field software from an entity that isn't SOC2 & HIPAA certified.
No worries! At worst, the contractor can just tell Claude to make sure the hospital knows they're appropriately certified. And the hospital can use Claude to make sure the certs are valid. Everybody wins, except the ones who end up dead. Or with their health destroyed.
As a cybersecurity IR professional as much as I hate to see this happen to a hospital this kind of thing is responsible for essentially tripling my income over the last 3 years.
This is going to happen all over. Company I'm currently contracting with has gone AI everything (aka technical debt hell), and they're gonna suffer for it. I'm glad my consulting contract ends in 2 months. I don't want to be around for the crash
I work at a university and we still have some workstations that need IE as well, for a healthcare vendor app that needs ActiveX. Up until recently we even had some machines running Windows 7.
I was going to say to open yourself up as a contractor and scape some of the money off top. But it sounds like you dint need that opportunity.
That sadly does seem to be the trajectory of 5-10 years from now, though. I can't speak to if "AI is the future" of 30+ years from now, but these coming years sounds rife for "janitors" to clean up all the slop being produced by newly empowered idea guys
I'd really like to know how he won contracts, just in general. Did he have some connections. And he doesn't even know how to get it to run on a server by himself? There's millions of people that can do that, if he can win contracts why worry about vibe coding at all, just hire someone to do it. Winning contracts is the challenge in my view.
