Thread

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

317 points · 408 comments · julian_digital

CharlieDigital · 1790023858 · focus · HN ↗
My take: it seems like systems should become smaller, more isolated, and contract-oriented.
I have been a long time proponent of monoliths, but it seems like agents would be happier with smaller, more isolated services. The more isolated, the better. Contracts between the service components only. Then it can iterate internally as long as it satisfies the contract. If it needs to, it can version the contract and keep iterating.
1. CuriouslyC · 1790037122 · focus · HN ↗
  Microservices are still bad. You want either a modular monolith or FaaS with most of the work in a domain library.
  1. 0xbadcafebee · 1790040566 · focus · HN ↗
    None of them are bad. It's like saying a bike vs a scooter vs a car is bad. Use them correctly and for what they're intended and they work fine. Use them improperly for the wrong things and suddenly people think the tools suck, when it's the humans who misused them that suck.
  2. CharlieDigital · 1790043093 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
2. rsanheim · 1790068654 · focus · HN ↗
  If we lived in a world where people or agents could define those service boundaries up front, correctly, with some reasonable foresight for change on the horizon ...then sure...I'd agree.
  However, our world is not that world. Your agents may be happy in their tiny walled kingdom of toil and ineffectiveness, but you and your users will not. Poorly drawn service boundaries will drag you down more than almost any other architectural mistake.
  If there is one universal amongst organizations, its that they love walls and silos. Be wary of putting them up ahead of time, cuz tearing them down once established is nearly impossible.
  1. CharlieDigital · 1790076869 · focus · HN ↗
    > If there is one universal amongst organizations, its that they love walls and silos.
    What's true for human organizations isn't necessarily true for agent-driven engineering. People and human teams struggle with contracts because there's always human negotiation involved. If the decisions are instead made by a team of agents, there's no more ego, ownership, miscommunications; just decisions based on whatever rules have been given to the orchestrator.
    > Your agents may be happy in their tiny walled kingdom...
    Yes indeed; the agents will always be happier if they can iterate faster, lint faster, build faster, test faster, ship faster, with smaller context.
    That would be the point of using contracts as boundaries so the agent can iterate more autonomously so long as it maintains the externally facing contract or version the contract if it needs to.

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