alt Hacker NewsI would have argued against you a couple of years ago, because I've also built stuff this way and it required a developer or two to care at least a little bit about database administration, and few of the one's I've met do.
However, these days, I notice my DBA skills atrophying because LLMs have encoded most of the answers and diagnostics I need in their weights. Coupled with something like Nix, spinning up new servers including backups and everything, it's easier easier than ever to run your own production database instance.
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Tanjreeve • today at 10:55 AM
Don't LLMs make it easier to write all the low level/boring stuff that makes managing a database deployment directly viable without the middleman?
It's easy doing a lot of stuff you don't understand quickly these days. But when the shit hits the fan and you have customers you need to know what you're doing.
Hiding behind the LLM, or even a cloud service like RDS makes you think you can get out of a corner, but you are nowhere near that. Practice, drills, experience are the only solution here. The illusion of that is dangerous.
I spent a couple of days recently digging one of our associated businesses out of the shit because they killed a postgres on RDS instance (AWS bug!) and couldn't google or LLM their way out of it. It hit the trade press and did a lot of damage to them.
If you're not going to do the work, don't take on customers.