Three weeks ago, I made an appointment to get a demo of a product I already knew I wanted to buy, because I had used it at another employer. No matter, the site would not let me sign us up until I got a demo and spoke to a sales drone. Last week, before that demo could actually happen, I used Claude to actually just create an internal tool that is good enough to just cancel the demo. It’s an internal security awareness training program. It’s now managed with an audit log in google sheets, a quiz in google forms, auto-generated completion certs using an appscript attached to the form submission action. It took maybe 3-4 hours to get together. It has so far not ever failed or had a hiccup.
Yesterday morning, I priced out a solution for doing backups of the repositories in our GitHub organization. It was the classic cable TV problem: It was expensive, and the only way to get the features I wanted was to upgrade to a plan that would have me paying for all kinds of stuff I don’t need just to get the one thing I do. Yesterday afternoon, I started testing a homegrown solution that Claude helped me build, complete with a docker image, python code, terraform code to deploy it all, a README suitable for anyone either using or managing the service, etc.
It actually is already a new world. It’s not just coming, it’s here, and companies need to start thinking hard not only about what their customers want and need, but what they’re competing with. I’m not sure it’s possible to understand what you’re competing with if you don’t have an internal capability around AI. Just six months ago it might’ve still been true that the bar for creating “good enough” solutions internally was too high for a lot of customers. The list of products for which that’s still true is shrinking quite rapidly!