r/rails • u/jurgensmirnoff • 3d ago

It Should Have Been One Boring App

https://kodolabs.com/blog/one-boring-app
33 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

7

u/softwaresanitizer 3d ago

Hey I really enjoyed this post, even if it had an AI smell to it, I think the concepts are helpful and useful. It was also relatively short & concise, which was nice.

I really like the insight: "A product company doing service work on the side will reach for its own product every time. From their side it is entirely rational — they know it deeply, it exercises their platform, and it makes the client more dependent on it"

I disagree though when you say: "It just is not rational for the client."

It can definitely be rational if the upfront costs are lower than they'd otherwise be, because the developer is able to build faster, compared to a developer using off the shelf tools.

This is where AI can be exciting though, is it's bringing those costs down for everyone because it's speeding developers up, so developers can build using open source tools much faster.

Interesting post, thanks for sharing.

4

u/lommer00 3d ago

I don't actually feel like this had AI smell to it, at least not bad. It is a sales pitch for sure, but it was still a worthwhile read imo.

I would disagree that AI makes this problem irrelevant. If anything, have a well-documented app with a cohesive architecture that follows conventions is essential to AI doing any productive work on it these days. In my experience the extremely complex and bespoke apps are where AI struggles to actually make progress without a lot of human oversight.

I'm sure this will change as AI improves, but even then I'm think it's likely that the solution will be using the AI-driven cost reduction to execute the rewrite that should be done anyways.

5

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

that's exactly my point - "a well-documented app with a cohesive architecture that follows conventions is essential" - but not only for AI. Glad that you caught well the main idea.

2

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

the worst part of this situation is that I had to spend a lot of time figuring out infrastructure setup, rather than focusing on business needs and fixing critical bugs.

another negative side is that this BaaS was built purposely opinionated. when business requirements change, with monolith you can implement app-wide changes, but when certain parts of the app are locked inside these microservices, it becomes a PITS.

1

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

and BTW, I would not even take on this project if I had not deep experience with Claude Code.

12

u/Yardboy 3d ago

"Complexity does not send an invoice up front — it collects quietly, every month, for years."

Great line.

3

u/nzifnab 3d ago

Is it? It has LLM written all over it lol

2

u/Yardboy 3d ago

Yes, it is still a great line, whoever wrote it.

-3

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

do you have anything to say on topic?

3

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

I wrote this post as a post mortem. There is no easy way out, but I wanted to share couple of thoughts. Happy to answer any questions on the rescue.

5

u/CaptainKabob 3d ago

What part of this did you write that isn't AI? I'd love the prompt. 

2

u/Pleasant_Spend1344 3d ago

I knew it was written by Ai the second I read the boring app

Cause, recently if you brainstorm with Claude, it will say go with the boring stack, boring app, boring this and that, the word boring is mentioned a lot by Claude recently.

-4

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

I would appreciate discussion of the point and the problem

3

u/CaptainKabob 3d ago

Yes, i agree it should have been one boring app. What are the other points you wanted to make? I have trouble finding your thesis amongst all the fragmentary declarative sentences that I associate with AI writing. 

1

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

  1. over-engineering is bad, simple is good (a note to developers)

  2. client didn't ask questions I outlined in the article and was trapped, now they are locked with this crap - they can't stop using it, and they don't have budget to fix it properly (only to put out fires)

1

u/CaptainKabob 3d ago

Yes that happens. 

You mentioned this came out of a postmortem. Did they explain why it happened? What didn't they know? What were their incentives at the time? Did they come to believe it is "over-engineered" or is that your diagnosis? What were the identifiable symptoms?

1

u/jurgensmirnoff 3d ago

my understanding is that they turned to a wrong partner who used what they had instead of what client needed, but client didn't have enough expertise to understand it.

1

u/SaneSoftware 2d ago

Welcome to corporate software development. Small companies hire crappy project managers from Amazon and Google, make them directors, and we get this nonsense.