Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years
23 points
2 hours ago
| 5 comments
| felixbarbalet.com
| HN
somat
41 minutes ago
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"When the software is being written by agents as much as by humans, the familiar-language argument is the weakest it has ever been - an LLM does not care whether your codebase is Java or Clojure. It cares about the token efficiency of the code, the structural regularity of the data, the stability of the language's semantics across releases."

Isn't familiarity with the language even more the case with a LLM. The language they do best with is the one with the largest corpus in the training set.

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dgb23
1 minute ago
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Familiarity matters to some degree. But there are diminishing returns I think.

Stability, consistency and simplicity are much more important than this notion of familiarity (there's lots of code to train on) as long as the corpus is sufficiently large. Another important one is how clear and accessible libraries, especially standard libraries, are.

Take Zig for example. Very explicit and clear language, easy access to the std lib. For a young language it is consistent in its style. An agent can write reasonable Zig code and debug issues from tests. However, it is still unstable and APIs change, so LLMs get regularly confused.

Languages and ecosystems that are more mature and take stability very seriously, like Go or Clojure, don't have the problem of "LLM hallucinates APIs" nearly as much.

The thing with Clojure is also that it's a very expressive and very dynamic language. You can hook up an agent into the REPL and it can very quickly validate or explore things. With most other languages it needs to change a file (which are multiple, more complex operations), then write an explicit test, then run that test to get the same result as "defn this function and run some invocations".

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ehnto
31 minutes ago
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And they're very sensitive to new releases, often making it difficult to work with after a major release of a framework for example. Tripping up on minor stuff like new functions, changes in signatures etc.

A stable mature framework then is the best case scenario. New frameworks or rapidly changing frameworks will be difficult, wasting lots of tokens on discovery and corrections.

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avereveard
7 minutes ago
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Eh, it's skipped in "the enemy" section an important bit, that was spelled out in the intro by the buyer, and wasn't listened: if the small vendor goes bust, who maintains the system after? if you plan for in 10 year cycles, greenfield buys look scary

That why vc look favorably to startup which go trough the motion of setting up partner led sales channel. an established partner taking maintenance contracts bridge the disconnect in the lifecycle gap between the two realities.

But no, corporate is bad, I guess.

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JSR_FDED
1 hour ago
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The core insight that enterprises select products on familiarity over anything else, is valuable. I’m going to keep it in mind for future customer engagements.
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BrenBarn
1 hour ago
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> And they put it succinctly: buying from a small innovative company is brave while buying from a big, well recognised name is an insurance policy and the risk-averse buyer must have the insurance.

As the article notes, the alternatives from the large companies suck. So this is like buying fire insurance from a company that promptly sets fire to your house. You are buying the insurance while knowing you will need it because the disaster is already happening.

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sublinear
28 minutes ago
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> Enterprise knowledge has always been as much a human problem as a technology one. Nobody wants to do the structuring work, and every prior architecture demanded that somebody do the structuring work rather than their actual job

This is correct and very agreeable to everyone, but then after some waffle they then write this:

> Structure, for the first time, can be produced from content instead of demanded from people

These quotes are very much at odds. Where is this structure and content supposed to come from if you just said that nobody makes it? Nowhere in that waffle is it explained clearly how this is really supposed to work. If you want to sell AI and not just grift, this is the part people are hung up on. Elsewhere in the article are stats on hallucination rates of the bigger offerings, and yet there's nothing to convince anyone this will do better other than a pinky promise.

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