This, I absolutely hate it. And like the author said, it must be intentional, so that someone at Google can show the usage numbers and get a promotion.

So well put, my good sir, this describes exactly my feelings with k8s. It always starts off all good with just managing a couple of containers to run your web app. Then before you know it, the devops folks have decided that they need to put a gazillion other services and an entire software-defined networking layer on top of it.

After spending a lot of time "optimizing" or "hardening" the cluster, cloud spend has doubled or tripled. Incidents have also doubled or tripled, as has downtime. Debugging effort has doubled or tripled as well.

I ended up saying goodbye to those devops folks, nuking the cluster, booted up a single VM with debian, enabled the firewall and used Kamal to deploy the app with docker. Despite having only a single VM rather than a cluster, things have never been more stable and reliable from an infrastructure point of view. Costs have plummeted as well, it's so much cheaper to run. It's also so much easier and more fun to debug.

And yes, a single VM really is fine, you can get REALLY big VMs which is fine for most business applications like we run. Most business applications only have hundreds to thousands of users. The cloud provider (Google in our case) manages hardware failures. In case we need to upgrade with downtime, we spin up a second VM next to it, provision it, and update the IP address in Cloudflare. Not even any need for a load balancer.

I think this is probably true, and basically how I got into software myself.

I always dabbled in writing software and things for the web, but for some reason I never thought studying computer science would be any fun and that a career as a software developer sounded boring. But then I got an actual full time office job and oh boy, did my perspective on things change fast.

That first job did not have anything to do with writing software at all. But I saw people struggle with things that seemed to me trivial to automate, such as making annotations on paper bank statements and entering them into the system line-by-line. The bookkeeping system did support electronic bank statements, but lacked features to match certain descriptions to certain cost places. In the end it was indeed faster to go the paper route... It took me a couple of hours to write something that saved hours every week and that basically kick started my software career.

Would AI have made much of a difference here? Yes, in terms of getting to the correct solution faster, but probably not in terms of who would have done that. People would still come to the person who came up with the solution to ask for maintenance and new features.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47201078

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

One year ago I already ran qwen2.5-coder 7B locally for pretty decent autocomplete. And I still use it today as I haven't found anything better, having tried plenty of alternatives.

Today I let LLM agents write probably 60-80% of the code, but I frequently have to steer and correct it and that final 20% still takes 80% of the time.