Before Claude these people used to automate their processes in Excel. Then new people would come along and say, "None of this makes any sense to me so I'll just build my own even better automation in Excel". And again, and again. "Random sales people" won't ask Claude:
- Find out who was the PO in 2019, analyze why it was decided to introduce an additional status in FSTP-14475 instead of (...) What happens if the driver currently outside mobile coverage area and the task processing will return a 202 instead of a 200 (not described in the documentation; refer to FSTP-14385 for additional information), but the status will be updated before the deferred change returns (...)
Instead, they'll do something more like:
- I need to be able to quickly change this and that right here, get it done, don't make any mistakes.
Would be good if Claude could recognize an XY problem and respond "Understanding what you don't want is even more important than understanding what you do want" or "If you try to cut corners here again instead of following the established process - thereby making things more difficult for the people in the warehouse - I will inform your manager" instead of just charging ahead "you're absolutely right, see the goal, ignore the obstacles".
Second, it is easier to fix a flawed but already functional system than build a perfect one from scratch - without running into a problems, contradictions, previously unknown nuances during implementation. Because these contradictions, problems, and oddities over the last 10 years naturally gave you the requirements and specifications that no one of the sales-people and decision-making-people were able to articulate in a coherent way. And yes, now, having these specifications, you can rewrite it in Rust and do things better.
One of the conclusions I've come to - is that 90%+ of the featureitis is checkbox nonsense, often created for managers and administrators who will never use the tools themselves, and are materially harmful to the employees who actually use them, while, ironically, providing zero to sometimes negative value to the Enterprise.
Some of the most profitable projects have been at 20+ year $30B+ companies where a new-generation of technologists have come in and just ... thrown it all away. All the transitions, gates, forms, custom fields, labels, business rules - all of the crud just dumped in the garbage and, amazingly- zero interruption to business, and the tools all of a sudden became moderately useful instead of offensive.
This is very much on topic with Postman, Kibana, Jira, etc.. Pretty much any large enterprise software suite that in order to justify it's millions/dollar a year of license fees, has to pack in feature that aren't valuable to the end-users, but can be used to ratchet up and lock in the enterprise users.
The problem with all of these companies is that once they take VC money, and have a Board driving them to make the chart go up and to the right - they have no option but to destroy what once was a beautiful product, and turn it into a morass of pain.
Tools like ffmpeg, sqlite, vlc, curl, wireshark continue to be excellent because they were never infected with VC money.