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We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
131–140 of 278 posts
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#132Anyone who ships a k8s cluster to make a JS library available over RPC needs to have a long hard look in the mirror. Should have bundled node, quickjs, anything into the go nodes for the first pass. k8s truly is a cancer for many teams.
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Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
No offence, but inexperienced JS fanatics always do this because of some weird affectionado they have for the language itself. Otherwise, even a decently qualified CTO would have chosen to keep everything in Go from the beginning or might have not waited until they were bleeding $300k. JS is also the worst possible language choice for this problem. So, it definitely sounds a bunch of script kiddies with fancy titles…
What if you are about to get a potentially really high paying customer, but they might go elsewhere unless you deliver X feature immediately and it is so much quicker to do it with the JS script?
Given that the potential high paying customer is just that - a potential, one must always keep the long term platform stability in mind as it affects every other customer, not just this potential customer. Hence, it boils down to opportunity cost and setting the right expectations:
We can deliver feature X for you - incrementally broken down into sub-features x1, x2, x3 over a period of Y weeks/months
The other way to do this would be to build a custom integration on top of your existing APIs and beta test it alongside the customer, bill them accordingly and eventually merge the changes into the main platform, once you can guarantee stability.
But, both these methods will sound boring to VC funded companies as they are under constant pressure from VCs to show something in their weekly graphs - meaningful or not.
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#134The 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…
Wonder if the real value of LLMs/AI is similar to microservices in that it solves an organisational/culture problem.
In this case AI allowed the developer to make a change that the organisation would not have allowed. Regular rewrites don't let you signal to investors that you are AI ready/ascendant/agentic (whatever the latest AI hype term is) so would have been blocked. But, an AI rewrite.
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#135[dead]
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#136Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you are about to get a potentially really high paying customer, but they might go elsewhere unless you deliver X feature immediately and it is so much quicker to do it with the JS script?
Given that the potential high paying customer is just that - a potential, one must always keep the long term platform stability in mind as it affects every other customer, not just this potential customer. Hence, it boils down to opportunity cost and setting the right expectations: We can deliver feature X for you - incrementally broken down into sub-features x1, x2, x3 over a period of Y weeks/months The other way t…
The customer could be on the fence between you and a competitor and this customer could be potentially paying 10x more than all your existing customers together. It could make or break your company. They would go to the competitor immediately if you make it complicated for them and have delays with the setup. What do you do then?
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#138The 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…
>> This was costing us ~$300K/year in compute, and the number kept growing as more customers and detection rules were added. > For something so core to the business, I'm baffled that they let it get to the point where it was costing $300K per year. And this, this is the core/true/insightful story the executives will never hear about.
Eh. If you get into enterprise business, this is the accepted management style. AI will now mix this up a little, but before you basically needed to ask if you want to blow 300k on developer salaries to maybe fix something that is already working and generating money, or add more features to the roadmap you can pin on your chest. Scaling infrastructure is the best choice for 90% of managers, especially since they are not the ones paying for it and this kind of technical debt doesn't matter on typical bonus check timeframes.
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#139The 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 mostly agree, but it's more appropriate to weigh contributions against an FTE's output rather than their input. If I have a $10m/yr feature I'm fleshing out now and a few more lined up afterward, it's often not worth the time to properly handle any minor $300k/yr boondoggle. It's only worth comparing to an FTE's fully loaded cost when you're actually able to hire to fix it, and that's trickier since it takes time a…
The cost is not just tokens, you need an actual human contributor looking into the issue, prompting, checking output, validating, deploying,... Difficult to compute the actual AI ROI. If $300K didn't matter without AI, it probably still doesn't matter with AI.
Re: We rewrote JSONata with AI in a day, saved $500k/year
#140Wait could I have written a JSONata parser and sold it to reco.ai for $499k/yr?