alt Hacker NewsI'm hosting a Kubernetes cluster on Azure and trying to autoscale it to tens of thousands of vCPUs. The goal is to transparently replace dedicated developer workstations (edit: transparently replace compiling) because our codebase is really big and we've hired enough people this is viable.
edit: to clarify, I'm using recc which wraps the compiler commands like distcc or ccache. It doesn't require developers to give up their workspace.
Right now I'm using buildbarn. Originally, I used sccache but there's a hard cap on parallel jobs.
In terms of how LLMs help, they got me through all the gruntwork of writing jsonnet and dockerfiles. I have barely touched that syntax before so having AI churn it out was helpful to driving towards the proof of concept. Otherwise I'd be looking up "how do I copy a file into my Docker container".
AI also meant I didn't have to spend a lot of time evaluating competing solutions. I got sccache working in a day and when it didn't scale I threw away all that work and started over.
In terms of where the LLM fell short, it constantly lies to me. For example, it mounted the host filesystem into the docker image so it could get access to the toolchains instead of making the docker images self-contained like it said it would.
It also kept trying to not to the work, e.g. It randomly decides in the thinking tokens "let's fall back to a local caching solution since the distributed option didn't work" then spams me with checkmark emojis and claims in the chat message the distributed solution is complete.
A decent amount of it is slop, to be honest, but an 80% working solution means I am getting more money and resources to turn this into a real initiative. At which point I'll rewrite the code again but I'll pay closer attention now that I know docker better.
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You seem exceptionally bright. Most people are not like this. This is why they are struggling.
It sounds like you have a job, right out of college, but you're griping about not getting promoted faster. People generally don't get promoted 9 months into a job.
I'm reading your post and I am genuinely impressed but what you claim to have done. At the same time I am confused about what you would like to achieve within the first year of your professional career. You seem to be doing quite well, even in this challenging environment.
Are you sure they don't have to fix the build pipeline first? Tens of thousands of vCPUs for a single compilation run, or to accommodate 100 developers who try to compile their own changes?