alt Hacker News> see if it falls apart after handling one request per second
Most of the problems you talk about are problems if you intend your software to be used at scale.
If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
People used to do this in an Excel sheet.
Now they can ask Claude to make them a nice UI similar to MFP or whatever.
Data can be stored in a single JSON file.
It's going to take years before they see actual performance issues.
And even though it becomes an issue, right now an AI Agent can already provide a fix and a script to migrate the data.
My only concern really is about security.
But a private VPS only reachable through Tailscale and they're ahead of 99% of the rest.
Replies
> If you're building an app for yourself to track your own food habits; why does DB, framework, best practices matters?
They don't, it's just annoying as shit when things break at the worst time for lack of these "best practices" and you know that the only answer will be "do better". I'll give you an example. Years ago I migrated a lot of my app usage to selfhosted OSS apps for all the reasons one might list them. I did like 80% of what I perceived as the "important best practices". Setup ZFS with redundancy to handle drive failures, a UPS for power interruption, wireguard for secure access, docker for application and dependencies isolation, etc.
But there were always things I just thought "I should probably do that, but later. This is just for me"
It would be the end of the day, I'm tired and on bed wanting to just chill and watch something on my ipad, and what do you know my plex is down, again.
Why does it go down every few days? Now I need to go get a laptop, ssh into my server, docker logs. See a bunch of exceptions. I don't want to debug it today. Just restart it, ok it works again. Go to bed, start watching.
20 minutes in.. I think it's down again.. wtf? get the laptop again, google the error, something about sqlite db on an NFS share not being very stable. All my ZFS storage is only exposed as NFS and SMB share to another machine.. Ok, just restart and hope it works and I'll deal with it latter.
Forget for a couple of days. I'm with a friend as her place and want to watch again, and fuck me I never fixed the sqlite issue, nevermind lets just watch netflix.
Over the weekend, I'm determined to get this fixed. Move the application folder out of NFS on the local machine SSD. It doesn't have redundancy, but it's ok for now. I'll setup an rsync job to copy it to the NFS share in case the SSD fails. I just want to see if it'll be stable.
Few months pass, and it's been pretty stable until I have a power outage. The UPS was there, but the configuration to notify the OS to shutdown broke a while ago and I didn't notice. Files on ZFS are fine, but the some on the local SSD got corrupted and I didn't notice, including plex database. the rsync job just copied the corrupted file over the "backup" file.
It's late at night again, and I just want to relax and watch something and discover this happened. I could try to figure out how to recover it, but it's probably easier to just do a clean scan. It's gonna take hours. Lets just start it and go to sleep.
Later, lets just migrate everything to jellyfin. Have auto upgrade setup because I'm smart. Jellyfin 10.8 updates and unfavorites all the facorited music tracks. "You have backups right". "Well, yes I do. Let me make sure I have an evening cleared so I can setup another instance of jellyfin, run the old backups, export the favorite list, and import it in the new one"... oh there is no way to do that? I guess I can export it to CSV, get a plugin to automate it for me. the plugin hasn't been updated to 10.8 but there is a pull request. ok lets wait. Forget that I setup restic to delete backups older than 30 days. fuck me. I have the CSV somewhere I think. God my `/tmp` is ephemeral and I hope I haven't rebooted since then. phew it's there. fuck me still.
I have worked in managing services for most of my career. I know what I'm doing wrong. I need to setup monitoring, alerts, health checks, 321 backups (not just rsync to a zfs pool) and actually use a backup software that tracks file versions, off site redundancy, dashboards for anomaly detection, scheduled hardware upgrades and checks for memtest, disk health, UPS configuration checks. I know how 3 or 4 9s are achieved in the industry.
All your points are valid and I myself use these types of apps (eg. For handling invoices) internally. But, the second your app talks to the internet, you are more likely to shoot yourself in the foot. Look what happened to Clawdbot. Everyone who used it had their instances exposed to the internet.
AI can fix bugs, sure. But every time you ask it to fix the same problem, it will come up with a new solution - usually unnecessarily complex. Will we reach a point where the AI can be its own architect? Maybe. But, I know for a fact that it's not what we have right now.
Right now, AI needs an architect to tell it how it should solve a problem. The real value of software is in the lived human experiences, not just the code. That's why we make certain decisions different than an AI would.
Ask an AI to vibe code an invoice app. It will make some really lovely looking UI - which is what unfortunately people judge an app by - but with a MongoDb backend which is totally not the right solution for the problem. That's what I mean.