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We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

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Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#61

Post by ebb_earl_co »

xp84 wrote: post #14
slopinthebag wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has to be satire right? Like, you aren't out of touch on this. I get engineers maybe making the argument that $300k / year on cloud is the same as 1.5 devops engineers managing in-house solutions, but for just json parsing????

For numbers like that, I can never tell whether it's just a vastly larger-scale dataset than any that I've seen as a non-FAANG engineer, OR, a hilariously-wasteful application of "mAnAgEd cLoUd sErViCeS" to a job that I could do on a $200/month EC2 instance with one sinatra app running per core. This is a made-up comparison of course, not a specific claim. But I've definitely run little $40 k8s clusters that replaced…

Right, this is roughly my mental situation, too. I guess that streaming JSON things can eat up compute way faster than I had any intuition for!

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#62

Post by whalesalad »

amazingamazing wrote: post #17

how many billions of compute are wasted because this industry can't align on some binary format across all languages and APIs and instead keep serializing and deserializing things

JSON is not really the core issue which is the expression parser. "user.name = foo and user.id > 1000". Even if you were operating on binary data, turning an arbitrary pseudocode string into actual function logic + executing it would be the slow part.

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#63

Post by 52-6F-62 »

delijati wrote: post #22
torben-friis wrote: post #16

>The approach was the same as Cloudflare’s vinext rewrite: port the official jsonata-js test suite to Go, then implement the evaluator until every test passes. the first question that comes to mind is: who takes care of this now? You had a dependency with an open source project. now your translated copy (fork?) is yours to maintain, 13k lines of go. how do you make sure it stays updated? Is this maintainance factored…

it is all yolo from here on out ... every major ai decision we're making today feels like a bet that agi will eventually show up and clean up the mess

There is a choice, yet.

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#65

Post by deckar01 »

Aurornis wrote: post #19

The key point for me was not the rewrite in Go or even the use of AI, it was that they started with this architecture: > The reference implementation is JavaScript, whereas our pipeline is in Go. So for years we’ve been running a fleet of jsonata-js pods on Kubernetes - Node.js processes that our Go services call over RPC. That meant that for every event (and expression) we had to serialize, send over the network, ev…

You aren’t accounting for managerial politics. A product manager won’t gamble on a large project to lower operating cost, when their bonus is based on customer acquisition metrics.

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#66

Post by dpark »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #30

A principal engineer spending his week end vibe coding some slop at a rate of 13k lines of code in 7h to replace a vendor. Is this really the new direction we want to set for our industry? For the first time ever, I have had a CTO vibe conding something to replace my product [1] even though it cost less than a day of his salary. The direction we are heading makes me want to quit, all points to software now being wort…

> Is this really the new direction we want to set for our industry?

I think the better question is whether it’s avoidable. I share the concern but is there a real alternative? “Say no to AI!” is fine until your competitors decide they don’t share your concerns. Or at least not enough to stop using it.

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#67

Post by cromka »

If they were paying $500k/year, why haven't they paid someone to rewrite it? Surely would be cheaper still.

But above everything else, this is a great example of how much JavaScript inefficiency actually costs us, as humanity. How many companies burn money through like this?

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#69

Post by hiyer »

Aurornis wrote: post #19

The key point for me was not the rewrite in Go or even the use of AI, it was that they started with this architecture: > The reference implementation is JavaScript, whereas our pipeline is in Go. So for years we’ve been running a fleet of jsonata-js pods on Kubernetes - Node.js processes that our Go services call over RPC. That meant that for every event (and expression) we had to serialize, send over the network, ev…

I was thinking the same - if JSONata was a priority for them, why not choose a language with good support, like JS or Java? OTOH if development language was a priority why not choose a format that is well supported in it?

Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year

#70

Post by grogers »

jgalt212 wrote: post #58

These "solutions" place a lot of faith in a "complete" set of test cases. I'm not saying don't do this, but I'd feel more comfortable doing this plus hand-generating a bunch of property tests. And then generating code until all pass. Even better, maybe Claude can generate some / most of the property tests by reading the standard test suite.

Well they also shadowed production traffic and fixed some bugs that were causing mismatching results. Not saying that stuff can't still slip through, but it's a good way to evaluate it against real data in a way you can't from just test cases alone
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