Comment by chrismarlow9
2 days ago
I've seen it before and over time it always plays out similarly.
- the cloud was invented and we were told CTOs would be able to just point and click and make infrastructure and apps! What did we actually get? Another layer of abstraction to debug through. Does it have is perks? Yes. Does it have it's own problems? Yes. Is it more expensive than setting up bare metal and having a solid team? Well that depends on what you're doing and the economics of it and the team.
- then document storages came along like and got wildly popular like mongo and people were calling it the end of SQL! And no more complexity or relational nonsense. Everything is JSON and life is great. What actually happened? These companies realized over time their data was getting trashed, adding things and fixing bugs became complex in pure docstore systems. So the initial v1 was easy and looked beautiful but only 4 years in you have a production db with orphan data that's twice as big as it should be. New features take forever to see a clear path in adding it to the model because it's no longer as intuitive to get performance for a feature.
Anyway. I see AI taking both of these roads at the same time. In 5 years I believe the code will be a giant pile of unfixable mess for most vibe coded things. I also don't see it getting rid of programmers but just adding another layer of abstraction to the mix that yes is helpful, but only if you already know what you're doing, much like what came of the clouds.
What's wrong with the cloud? I get the point about a hype cycle but those two examples don't seem even remotely in the same universe of similarity. SQL is still around, but the cloud won pretty comprehensively no? If you're starting something new, there's still a debate around what's the best database to use and stuff, but I'm struggling to imagine a content where the idea of managing your own hardware would even make sense as something to consider outside of the context of an existing large company with pre-existing on prem infra? And at least in the web world, 90+% of the time you are just going to go and click some buttons in vercel and posthog and whatever and that's your infra. The generic saas webapps that make up a huge chunk of the new projects that would be making architecture decisions where you might theoretically consider on prem are pretty well covered by the point and click abstractions - most of them probably wouldn't exist with the friction and overhead of having to actually manage bare metal