Totally disagree - and - ideal scenario happens all the time.
Most of the time, in fact.
The level of lack of self awareness is really just staggering, as if these companies exist and claim billions in revenues, over, over and over again by the same customers ... by 'not doing anything useful'.
It's really an embarrassing posture.
'Management Consulting' is one of those things that is just culturally orthogonal to HN. There's a derision combined with a total lack of understanding, and so it ends up being a difficult thing to debate, like going against consensus on a reddit board.
They're' about as problematic as basically any other type of organization, aka we can loathe Google for all sorts of reasons, but they still do many things well, we mostly use them for various things.
Yes. Bureaucracy for sure when I throw festivals. ChatGPT pulls permits for me. (I think that uses a lot of tokens because of the browser control?) Manages the admin side along with some tools I built in Lovable via mcp servers.
Marketing definitely. My food truck side is relatively high volume and it manages my kitchen and warehouse side, basically generating all of the instructions my employees follow, managing and updating my PoSes, creating signage assets for specials, etc.
Reels/posts production and managing ad spend.
Here’s a fun one. I switched payroll providers after several years and suddenly my unemployment insurance rate went from 0.8% to 12.75% which is borderline debilitating to me. I knew something was wrong but not what and I work a lot of hours and calling the state takes forever and is usually unhelpful.
ChatGPT figured out that it was a penalty rate and dug in for me. Turns out because I’m seasonal and have no payroll for one quarter of every year, Gusto did not file a quarterly wage report, so even though I owed nothing I was delinquent. Gotta love government, it’s the only place where you can be delinquent for $0.
ChatGPT filed the report and requested a retroactive re-rate, which they granted. I’m sure I would have figured this out eventually but it would have taken hours, or $5 in tokens.
Would you say ChatGPT does everything you need today or do you still see some gaps? i.e. things you think it should be able to do but currently doesn’t, or things that still take too much effort on your part to setup chatgpt to do it.
Also, I have certainly gone down some unproductive rabbit holes figuring out what to do with it. Time spent on it is an investment, just like automating anything. You spend hours upfront to save them on an ongoing basis.
But, I think I’m on the black on it already after just a few months of heavy use. For instance I just tell it to book my dumpsters, bathrooms, sanitation crew, and security for X event. It goes and pulls event details, looks through my email to see who I get those from, and emails them relevant details, with no prompting.
Another good example: we launched a really fancy hot cocoa concept last fall that was a hit and I wanted to try to go to all of the local pumpkin patches in October and Christmas tree farms after Thanksgiving to serve when they have big crowds.
I asked it to contact all of the ones in my area and it sent out 70 emails and I booked several spots. It made me a nice database so I can see who followed up and who I need to reach out to again, etc. and it just gets those from my inbox.
Hours of my time saved with simple prompts. So while some things take awhile to pay off, some are instant.
Huge gaps. I expect the tooling to get better for non-programmers. Codex and Cowork are great, but you still feel like you’re trying to hammer the square peg through the circle hole often when using it for non-programming tasks.
The AI is good enough to do a lot of tasks but the tooling just isn’t caught up to it yet.
I’d say it’s freed up ten hours a week of my time. And that’ll only improve.
Ah. Yeah. I can’t wait until the tooling for non-programming tasks catches up to the tooling for programming. I’m sure it will happen. Most of the software world started off aimed at developers (because they made it) and then found its way to us muggles.
I don’t disagree but saying “cloud will change in the next 8-20y-ish” is a bit of a non-argument, you’re not really stating any thesis to speak of; Change is a given over that time frame.
I’m not so sure I agree, given the overwhelming concentration of capital and regulatory capture they have, I just don’t see them going anywhere; becoming more niche rather than even more of a standard is “going away” to a certain extent as far as I can see.
My understanding is that melatonin can overload certain receptors and cause an issue with fogginess since it works directly on the brain. 5HTP is more broad and is “gated“ on the same metabolic pathway, so cannot overload the system the way melatonin does.
If the ideal scenario never happens in practice, it's a flawed concept to begin with.