Thousands of microservices = thousands deployments that can fail, that needs to kept compatible, that needs to be able to find each other, that needs to be monitored. This is just pushing the pain downwards.
There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
51–60 of 183 posts
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
Continual gains that have not stopped and there is clearly much gain to be had even if model intelligence stopped scaling. I find it borderline nasty how so many people are positively hoping for a bubble to pop or an AI winter to come so that they can feel like they can cope with the evolving world...despite all evidence to the contrary that any of these things will happen very soon at all.
currently unfettered ai spending is reducing qol for more individuals than it is increasing. why should the avg joe be happy about reduced qol?
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#53Hundreds of bots modifying thousands of microservices may sound good on the surface, but all those thousands of microservices make up an architecture and a product. Agents aren't very good at carrying the entire model in their context, so when they reason about a small piece of code, they often come up with something that hurts other parts of the code (especially as the KLOCs pile up). The complexity hasn't been repl…
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
There will, at some point, be a capex winter. Companies are splurging on a huge buildout and aren't going to buy GPUs at this rate forever.
That does not mean we're all going back to artisanally hand-crafting software. That's never going to happen.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#54Pretty sure Uber ended up with thousands of microservices because they used to tie owning a service to perf and promo, and were trying to cut down the number for years. It's hilarious to see this interpreted as an intentional choice.
used to work for a company and this is exactly what happened, each team lead pushed for their own little secret garden and fight over who had to add new things. Managing the kafka instance(s) to keep order turned into 2 people's full time jobs. They sold at absolute fire sale price not long ago
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The agents are like ants, and ants build like crazy until the resources run out in winter. AI winter is going to be interesting, to say the least.
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
> plan for a world where it's always summer
The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#56My biggest issue with these type of posts is that they never answer the "why". Hell, they don't even ask the "why". > The more modular your code, the more agents you can run OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to? And are we actually being more productive? Take a look at Bun's repo on GitHub which seems to be fully automated. Well over 5000 PRs op…
> OK, but why would I want to run more agents? So I can be more productive? What does this productivity lead to?
software used outside of nerd niches? photoshop, canva, clickup, after effects and unreal engine over feh, imagemagick, impressive, emacs org mode, ffmpeg CLI and pico-8?
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#57> If you have a large monolithic service where every change has to be coordinated carefully..
Microservices are WAY harder to coordinate for deployments. You end up with feature service dependencies, and you are back to the same coordination, but now harder to discover down stream dependencies..
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
> plan for a world where it's always summer The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
But the models are useful now and Inference is profitable. At most we must worry that the latest is not actually useful, or that they won’t get better.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't say this to be mean, but you need to plan for a world where it's always summer. Maybe the valuations will collapse with OSS models but programming is never going back to normal.
> plan for a world where it's always summer The difficulty in adopting this belief lies in the fact we have multiple points of reference in the past, of visionaries claiming that "this time is different" and we reached the end of history... and well, the rest is history.
I hear you, but this time is different and history doesn't tell us what happens next. They were wrong those times. They would be correct today.
I don't have any clever argument to justify this, you just have to look at the ways the world is changing today and decide for yourself whether there is a clean historical analog.
Re: There's no such thing as a small software team anymore
#60Call me old school but I feel like the solution to humans clogging up the slop cannon will be for AI generated code to look more human.
That is, the code should be correct but also idiomatic.