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Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

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Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#51

Post by monsieurbanana »

nzach wrote: post #43

> It seems to me that existing good practices continue to work well. I haven't seen any radically new approaches to software design and development that only work with LLMs and wouldn't work without them. I've been thinking about it lately and I think you are right. LLMs haven't changed what is 'good software'. But they changed some proxies I used to have for what is 'good software'. In the past I've always loved pro…

I'm not sure llms produce good documentation. I'm open to hear more opinions on this, my feeling is that the documentation of llm-heavy projects is a bit too verbose, a bit off-target, sometimes completely irrelevant, very repetitive.

Not terrible, but I'll just point my own llm to it instead of reading it myself like I would for an actual great documentation

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#53

Post by troelsSteegin »

jensneuse wrote: post #33

One thing I find interesting is how GraphQL has evolved from an API technology for API consumers with "different needs" to an API technology for agents. What helped organizations scale GraphQL across multiple teams is Federation, a way to split one supergraph into multiple subgraphs. So, what works well to scale teams actually works equally well for agents. The core value you can get from Federation is a "coordinatio…

I think of "Federation" as aggregating content from disparate in-situ sources into a common index under a consistent schema. I agree that schema is good, am always tempted by big schema, and seem to always settle for task-specific schema with mappings between schemas strictly as necessary. LLM's seem nice for schema to schema mapping and supernice for binding entities from unstructured sources into schema. But overall I feel it is pointless to talk about structure without talking about hydration - about binding and mapping. Do you see that as "solved"?

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#54

Post by andrekandre »

iainmerrick wrote: post #44
thfuran wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use an LLM to format your code?

Right. The equivalent in handwritten code would be formatting your code by hand. That used to be the normal way to do it! For handwritten code, the evolution of best practices has tended to be: - just make your code look neat and tidy; - follow the style and conventions of existing code; - follow a strict formatting style guide; - format automatically using a tool. I don’t see why it should be any different with LLMs…

  > Why format with an LLM each time, when you can use the LLM once to write the formatter?
the right way to use an llm imo (and same for end-user features as well)... no need to waste tokens and wait time on something that can be done at a fraction of the cost and time (and be deterministic on top of that)

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#55

Post by staticassertion »

lesuorac wrote: post #42
jillesvangurp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you call it modularization, good design, SOLID principles, or micro services, etc. It all boils down to the same thing. I usually dumb it down to two easy to understeand metrics: cohesiveness and coupling. Something with high cohesiveness and low coupling tends to be small and easy to reason about. Things that are small, can be easily replaced, fixed, changed, etc. with relatively low risk. Even if you have a…

> Or you can put code in different package and guard internal package cohesiveness and coupling a bit and use well defined interfaces to call a functions through. While I do think actual microservices are over-kill. I don't think I've seen code anywhere that survives multiple years where somebody doesn't use internal state of another package. Like if you don't force people to use a hard barrier (i.e. HTTP) then there…

This is also extremely common with LLMs, in my experience. They grep, find something, make it `pub`, etc.

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#56

Post by staticassertion »

poly2it wrote: post #46
areys wrote: post #37

[flagged]

What's the point of flooding this site with slop accounts? Do people just want to see the world burn? Why attack culture?

I have wondered this as well. Maybe it's trying to train based on which accounts get flagged/ time-to-flag or something? Otherwise... who would bother with this? It's so dumb.

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

thfuran wrote: post #48
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That had me bogling too. But you know what? A local MoE model roughly equivalent to sonnet mid-2025? Totally possible. Just costs electricity to run, put it in your CI/CD pipeline. Have it apply a bit of intelligence to the thing as well. Uh.... if you've got a spare box, why not? (the fact that said spare box would cost an arm and a leg in 2026 is... a minor detail)

Why not? Because you can get stronger guarantees of correctness and consistency out of a typical code formatter, which will also probably run about a million times faster.

[deleted]

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#58

Post by [deleted] »

thfuran wrote: post #48
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That had me bogling too. But you know what? A local MoE model roughly equivalent to sonnet mid-2025? Totally possible. Just costs electricity to run, put it in your CI/CD pipeline. Have it apply a bit of intelligence to the thing as well. Uh.... if you've got a spare box, why not? (the fact that said spare box would cost an arm and a leg in 2026 is... a minor detail)

Why not? Because you can get stronger guarantees of correctness and consistency out of a typical code formatter, which will also probably run about a million times faster.

[deleted]

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#59

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

staticassertion wrote: post #32
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't libraries just "services" without some transport layer / gateway? You should only ever have a separate "service" if there's a concrete reason to. You should never have a "service" to make things simpler (it inherently does not). Libraries on the other hand are much more subjective.

> Aren't libraries just "services" without some transport layer / gateway? Libraries can share memory, mutable state, etc. Services can not. > (it inherently does not) That's going to be debatable.

> That's going to be debatable.

It's really not. A service adds complexity. If you have no reason to add it besides to "reduce complexity" - that is an oxymoron.

There are many concrete reasons to have one. Reducing complexity is not one.

That's like arguing you can drive farther forward if you go in reverse. No.

There are reasons to drive in reverse. To move forward is not one of them.

Re: Does coding with LLMs mean more microservices?

#60

Post by Kim_Bruning »

thfuran wrote: post #48
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That had me bogling too. But you know what? A local MoE model roughly equivalent to sonnet mid-2025? Totally possible. Just costs electricity to run, put it in your CI/CD pipeline. Have it apply a bit of intelligence to the thing as well. Uh.... if you've got a spare box, why not? (the fact that said spare box would cost an arm and a leg in 2026 is... a minor detail)

Why not? Because you can get stronger guarantees of correctness and consistency out of a typical code formatter, which will also probably run about a million times faster.

You're not wrong. Though now I am thinking of ways an LLM in CI might be useful, (dijkstra forgive me).
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