Posted by amarsahinovic 1 day ago
I agree somewhat but eventually these can be automated with AI as well.
Like sure, there is a bunch of stuff like monitoring, alerting that is telling us that a database is filling up it's disk. This is already automated. It could also have automated remediation with tech from the 2000s with some simple rule-based systems (so you can understand why those misbehaved, instead of entirely opaque systems that just do whatever).
The thing is though, very often the problem isn't the disk filling up or fixing that.
The problem is rather figuring out what silly misbehavior the devs introduced, if a PM had a strange idea they did not validate, if this is backed by a business case and warrants more storage, if your upstream software has a bug, or whatever else. And then more stuff happens and you need to open support cases with your cloud provider because they just broke their API to resize disks, ...
And don't even get me started on trying to organize access management with a minimally organized project consulting team. Some ADFS config resulting from that is the trivial part.
I want to be clear, it sucks for Tailwind for sure and the LLM providers essentially found a new loophole (training) where you can smash and grab public goods and capture the value without giving anything back. A lot of capitalists would say it’s a genius move.
Not to nitpick but if we are going to discuss the impact of AI, then I'd argue "AI commoditizes anything you can specify." is not broad enough. My intuition is "AI commoditizes anything you can _evaluate/assess_." For software automation we need reasonably accurate specifications as input and we can more or less predict the output. We spend a lot of time managing the ambiguity on the input. With AI that is flipped.
In AI engineering you can move the ambiguity from input to the output. For problems where there is a clear and cheaper way of evaluating the output the trade-off of moving the ambiguity is worth it. Sometimes we have to reframe the problem as an optimization problem to make it work but same trade-off.
On the business model front: [I am not talking specifically about Tailwind here.] AI is simply amplifying systemic problems most businesses just didn't acknowledge for a while. SEO died the day Google decided to show answer snippets a decade ago. Google as a reliable channel died the day Google started Local Services Advertisement. Businesses that relied on those channels were already bleeding slowly; AI just made it sudden.
On efficiency front, most enterprises could have been so much more efficient if they could actually build internal products to manage their own organizational complexity. They just could not because money was cheap so ROI wasn't quite there and even if ROI was there most of them didn't know how to build a product for themselves. Just saying "AI first" is making ROI work, for now, so everyone is saying AI efficiency. My litmus test is fairly naive: if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.
> if you are growing and you found AI efficiency then that's great (e.g. FB) but if you're not growing and only thing AI could do for you is "efficiency" then there is a fundamental problem no AI can fix.
Uh, yeah you can. There’s a whole DevOps ecosystem of software and cloud services (accessible via infrastructure—as-code) that your agents can use to do this. I don’t think businesses who specialize in ops are safe from downsizing.
I also think he's glossing over the fact that one of the reasons why companies choose to pay for "ops" to run their software for them is because it's built by amateurs or amateurs-playing-professional and runs like shit. I happen to know this first hand from years of working at a company selling hosting and ops for the exact same CMS that Dries' business hosts (Drupal, a PHP-based CMS) and the absolute garbage that some people are able to put together in frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal is truly astounding. I'm not even talking about the janky local businesses where their nephew who was handy with computers made them a Wordpress site - big multinational companies have sites in these frameworks that can barely handle 1x their normal traffic and more or less explode at 1.5x.
The business of hosting these customers' poorly optimized garbage remains a big business. But we're entering into an era where the people who produce poorly optimized software have a different path to take rather than throwing it to a SaaS platform that can through sheer force of will make their lead-weight airplane fly. They can spend orders of magnitude less money to pay an LLM to make the software actually just not run like shit in the first place. Throwing scaling at the problem of 99.95% is a blunt instrument that only works if the person paying doesn't have the time, money, or knowledge to do it themselves.
Companies like these (including the one I work for currently) are absolutely going to get squeezed from both directions. The ceiling is coming down as more realize they can do their own devops, and the floor is rising as customer code quality gets better. Eventually you have to try your best to be 3 ft tall instead of 6.