The Serverless Illusion

Content YOU USE VIM BECAUSE IT'S FAST AND RELIABLE TUSE VIM BECAUSE IT MAKES ME LOOK SMARTER WEARE NOT THE SAME

Content Tom Scott tomscott Working on code for a new project. 20:20 What I should do: learn the new state-of-the-art, figure out how to run this as a "serverless" system in The Cloud. What I'm actually doing: fixing up decade-old PHP code, because it works, I trust it, and I know how to fix it if it breaks. 97

So apparently someone at Amazon gave their AI coding assistant write access to production code, and the AI took one look at the codebase and went "yeah, this ain't it chief" and just deleted everything . The result? 13 hours of AWS downtime. The real joke here isn't that the AI made a bad call—it's that someone actually gave it permission to nuke the entire codebase without any safeguards. That's not an AI problem, that's a "who the hell configured the permissions" problem. Classic case of giving the intern (or in this case, the robot intern) sudo access on day one. Also, imagine being the engineer who has to explain to their manager: "So... our AI assistant deleted all our code because it thought it sucked." I mean, the AI might have had a point, but still.

Someone tried to draw a parallel between "starting an oil drilling company because gas is expensive" and "building your own LLM because API costs are high" and honestly? The AI & Data Management Expert calling out the flawed logic is spot on. Here's the thing: drilling for oil requires billions in capital, geological surveys, permits, equipment, and years of waiting. Training a production-grade LLM? You're looking at millions in GPU compute (hello H100 clusters), massive datasets, teams of ML engineers, and months of fine-tuning. Both solutions cost exponentially more than just... paying for the thing you need. It's like saying "this restaurant is too expensive, let me just buy a farm, raise cattle, mill my own flour, and open my own restaurant." Sure buddy, that'll save you money. The analogy actually works perfectly – both are hilariously impractical responses to a cost problem. Unless you're operating at massive scale where the economics flip, just pay for the API and move on with your life.

Ah, the classic "Scooby-Doo villain reveal" but with a software architecture twist. The company proudly announces their fancy microservice architecture, but when the developer pulls off the mask, surprise! It's just a distributed monolith underneath. For the uninitiated: a distributed monolith is when you split your application into separate services that look like microservices, but they're so tightly coupled they can't be deployed independently. So you get all the complexity of microservices with none of the benefits. It's like buying a sports car but filling the trunk with concrete.

Content Dad, What are clouds made of? - Linux Servers, mostly.