4 ms·

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users". As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky. 99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

Iulioh 6mo ago
Well, users or _paying_ users? It's an important distinction
- jjk166 6mo ago
  Probably either. And excluding non-paying users only further narrows the applicability.
aerhardt 6mo ago
Distributing an app to 100 users inside an enterprise is already a hellish nightmare and I'm pretty convinced that citizen developers will never be a thing - we'll sooner reach the singularity.
- jschveibinz 6mo ago
  Here's my take: I think that citizen developers will be a thing--but not in the way you might be thinking. More people will be enabled (and empowered) to "build" quick-and-dirty solutions to personal problems by just talking to their phone: "I need way to track my food by telling you what I ate and then you telling me how much I have left for today. And suggest what my next meal should be." In the current paradigm--which is rapidly disappearing--that requires a UI app that makes you type things in, select from a list, open the app to see what your totals are, etc. And it's a paid subscription. In 6 months, that type of app can be ancient history. No more subscription. So it's not about "writing apps for SaaS subscribers." It's about not needing to subscribe to apps at all. That's the disruption that's taking place. Crappy code, maintenance, support, etc.--no longer even a factor. If the user doesn't like performance, they just say "fix ___" and it's fixed. What subscription apps can't be replaced in this disruption? Tell me what you think.
  - aerhardt 6mo ago
    Well, your example is timely. Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a weekly calorie plan and it was perfect. But then I still use MyFitnessPal to log my calories because their food database is outstanding, and the UX of scanning food barcodes is unbeatable. They have the most niche items in my country, Spain. How are LLMs going any of that? An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. Maybe I could build a custom app that scans the nutrition facts table and with voice I could explain how much I ate or something - I’m technical, but really, I have better things to do and I’d rather pay MFP 10 bucks a month.
    - dragandj 6mo ago
      > An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. "I could have written Facebook over a weekend" syndrome :)
    - tstrimple 6mo ago
      The data sources often exist to build these things yourself. For your example there is Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ Both would make a great foundation for this sort of app. OFF is crowdsourced and does include barcode information. I have no idea how robust the dataset is for your geography though. If I were to build something like this for personal use, I'd be looking at a PWA that can leverage the camera for barcode scanning. I'd work with the existing crowd sourced database as well as provide a mechanism for "manual" entry which should just be scanning a barcode and taking a picture of the nutrition information. I've personally built systems like this before and all of these things are well within the capability of most SOTA LLM to build out.
      - aerhardt 6mo ago
        I am not going to even try until it becomes a literal weekend project with zero maintenance and perfect reliability. Maintenance is crucial - I would not want to become the maintainer of two dozen apps that are genuinely useful to me. At 10€ a month the economics are not there. Even researching if the codebar database has perfect coverage in Spain like MFP sounds like more time than I would like to invest. I have a thousand other projects I’d like to build.
mattmanser 6mo ago
That's not actually true. When you move to the enterprise layer, suddenly you get the opposite problem, you have a low amount of "users" but you often need a load of CPU intensive or DB intensive processing to happen quickly. One company I worked for had their system built by, ummmm, not the greatest engineers and were literally running out of time in the day to run their program. Every client was scheduled over 24 hours, and they'd got to running the program for 22 hours per day and were desperately trying to fix it before they ran out of "time". They couldn't run it in parallel because part of the selling point of the program was that it amalgamated data from all the clients.
- bearjaws 6mo ago
  Without seeing more this seems like it could be solved by not recomputing the entire history to add on data. Depends what kind of math you are doing however. Some sort of check point system could likely save significant IO. What am I missing that requires you to recompute all data every day?
  - mattmanser 6mo ago
    I can't go into too much detail because of NDA. It was receiving huge volumes of data from each financial client, and matching it all up to try and find certain things. And match it with existing historical data. Not ads or online tracking. So the loop was adding this data and recalculating everything, It had to be done sequentially, I can't remember the exact reason, but it was a good one. I was only there a few months as they were so dysfunctional I jumped to another job offer I'd received. We were having endless sprint meetings to "plan" this work when all it needed was someone experienced like me refactoring it for a coupe of days. There was a lot of junior devs with senior developer titles as everyone invariably got promoted every year. The funny thing about the sprint cards was all the tasks I put up a 1 for, the other developers put up a 10, and all the ones I put up 10s for the other developers put up 1s. That's what happens when you let junior devs have a say, no comprehension of what's hard or not. Before I went I did point out the multiple pretty obvious O(n²) loops they had in the main calculation loop the results of which could easily be cached but I don't know if it went whoosh over their heads. I'm pretty certain if they'd just let me got on with it instead of holding up sprint cards in the meetings they'd have been down to doing the whole lot is a 1/2 hour run a day, even in the short time I was there. In my experience the first run of optimizing something like that usually doesn't take long and has huge benefits.

Iulioh 6mo ago

Well, users or _paying_ users? It's an important distinction

jjk166 6mo ago
Probably either. And excluding non-paying users only further narrows the applicability.

aerhardt 6mo ago

Distributing an app to 100 users inside an enterprise is already a hellish nightmare and I'm pretty convinced that citizen developers will never be a thing - we'll sooner reach the singularity.

jschveibinz 6mo ago
Here's my take: I think that citizen developers will be a thing--but not in the way you might be thinking. More people will be enabled (and empowered) to "build" quick-and-dirty solutions to personal problems by just talking to their phone: "I need way to track my food by telling you what I ate and then you telling me how much I have left for today. And suggest what my next meal should be." In the current paradigm--which is rapidly disappearing--that requires a UI app that makes you type things in, select from a list, open the app to see what your totals are, etc. And it's a paid subscription. In 6 months, that type of app can be ancient history. No more subscription. So it's not about "writing apps for SaaS subscribers." It's about not needing to subscribe to apps at all. That's the disruption that's taking place. Crappy code, maintenance, support, etc.--no longer even a factor. If the user doesn't like performance, they just say "fix ___" and it's fixed. What subscription apps can't be replaced in this disruption? Tell me what you think.
- aerhardt 6mo ago
  Well, your example is timely. Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a weekly calorie plan and it was perfect. But then I still use MyFitnessPal to log my calories because their food database is outstanding, and the UX of scanning food barcodes is unbeatable. They have the most niche items in my country, Spain. How are LLMs going any of that? An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. Maybe I could build a custom app that scans the nutrition facts table and with voice I could explain how much I ate or something - I’m technical, but really, I have better things to do and I’d rather pay MFP 10 bucks a month.
  - dragandj 6mo ago
    > An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. "I could have written Facebook over a weekend" syndrome :)
  - tstrimple 6mo ago
    The data sources often exist to build these things yourself. For your example there is Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central. https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/ Both would make a great foundation for this sort of app. OFF is crowdsourced and does include barcode information. I have no idea how robust the dataset is for your geography though. If I were to build something like this for personal use, I'd be looking at a PWA that can leverage the camera for barcode scanning. I'd work with the existing crowd sourced database as well as provide a mechanism for "manual" entry which should just be scanning a barcode and taking a picture of the nutrition information. I've personally built systems like this before and all of these things are well within the capability of most SOTA LLM to build out.
    - aerhardt 6mo ago
      I am not going to even try until it becomes a literal weekend project with zero maintenance and perfect reliability. Maintenance is crucial - I would not want to become the maintainer of two dozen apps that are genuinely useful to me. At 10€ a month the economics are not there. Even researching if the codebar database has perfect coverage in Spain like MFP sounds like more time than I would like to invest. I have a thousand other projects I’d like to build.

mattmanser 6mo ago

That's not actually true. When you move to the enterprise layer, suddenly you get the opposite problem, you have a low amount of "users" but you often need a load of CPU intensive or DB intensive processing to happen quickly. One company I worked for had their system built by, ummmm, not the greatest engineers and were literally running out of time in the day to run their program. Every client was scheduled over 24 hours, and they'd got to running the program for 22 hours per day and were desperately trying to fix it before they ran out of "time". They couldn't run it in parallel because part of the selling point of the program was that it amalgamated data from all the clients.

bearjaws 6mo ago
Without seeing more this seems like it could be solved by not recomputing the entire history to add on data. Depends what kind of math you are doing however. Some sort of check point system could likely save significant IO. What am I missing that requires you to recompute all data every day?
- mattmanser 6mo ago
  I can't go into too much detail because of NDA. It was receiving huge volumes of data from each financial client, and matching it all up to try and find certain things. And match it with existing historical data. Not ads or online tracking. So the loop was adding this data and recalculating everything, It had to be done sequentially, I can't remember the exact reason, but it was a good one. I was only there a few months as they were so dysfunctional I jumped to another job offer I'd received. We were having endless sprint meetings to "plan" this work when all it needed was someone experienced like me refactoring it for a coupe of days. There was a lot of junior devs with senior developer titles as everyone invariably got promoted every year. The funny thing about the sprint cards was all the tasks I put up a 1 for, the other developers put up a 10, and all the ones I put up 10s for the other developers put up 1s. That's what happens when you let junior devs have a say, no comprehension of what's hard or not. Before I went I did point out the multiple pretty obvious O(n²) loops they had in the main calculation loop the results of which could easily be cached but I don't know if it went whoosh over their heads. I'm pretty certain if they'd just let me got on with it instead of holding up sprint cards in the meetings they'd have been down to doing the whole lot is a 1/2 hour run a day, even in the short time I was there. In my experience the first run of optimizing something like that usually doesn't take long and has huge benefits.