IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

TomServo

TomServo

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TJT said:
I haven't yet heard of any company opting to run open source AI on their own datacenter or AWS to save money paying Claude Code and the like.

Today, right now, paying the freemium rate is LOTS cheaper. But that is a fuse on a bomb. One just long enough that leadership today doesn't see what's happening.
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The performance goals necessitate the extreme quarterly thinking. thus AI accelerated to hell and Cloud migration to eliminate capex so he meets his goals for his bonus. it is absolutely not long term a good idea. We are not running AI on our on hardware. we are using aws bedrock to run a slew of different models.
 
TJT

TJT

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The costs of getting spitroasted by paying Claude Code (or whoever) for models and licensing and then paying AWS to operate the models is going to be absolutely insane.
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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TJT said:
The costs of getting spitroasted by paying Claude Code (or whoever) for models and licensing and then paying AWS to operate the models is going to be absolutely insane.
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It is the razor blade business model: Lure you in with a cheap "starter pack", only to then fleece you with the subsequent blades. And some time later offering you the next model, now with one more blade.

Worked wonders with inkjet printers and standard software licensing (e.g. Adobe).
 
Noodleface

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I actually stopped using the windsurf IDE today because it was so bad and went back to vanilla VSCode. Told my boss the company can shove it .

From what I heard Google tried to buy windsurf, then instead just poached the founders and left the shell of a company
 
Haus

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Cad said:
But those are the trends because thats currently cheaper, no? If running on their own metal was cheaper, they'd be doing that, wouldn't they?
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There's a degree of cost savings, but many places are now hitting a wall of cost accelerating because of sloppy architecture trying to "scale". But I know places right now that have things they would love to bring back into their own data centers, but can't because it's getting harder and harder to find people who can run a good data center properly.

Also AI is driving a spiraling price rocket on essential hardware. Is essence AI needs all the memory, not just all the memory now, but all the memory that's going to be produced for the next 5-10 years... And all of a lot of other resources... and a lot of the electricity, in fact more than is currently being generated.

But I digress, I'm still waiting because I still think the "AI Hype Train Investment Cycle" bubble will pop in around a year. That will still leave the "AI as a technology" to keep advancing (just more organically) , which will keep the inevitable movement towards "AI breaks how we exist because we just don't need so many people anymore" factor.
 
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Khane

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"new and shiny" often overrules "cost effective" when it comes to technology and how companies decide what technology to utilize. Lots of money gets thrown around and wasted regarding tech.
 
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ShakyJake

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Noodleface said:
I actually stopped using the windsurf IDE today because it was so bad and went back to vanilla VSCode. Told my boss the company can shove it .

From what I heard Google tried to buy windsurf, then instead just poached the founders and left the shell of a company
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Why do they even care which IDE you use? Everyone in engineering at my company uses Visual Studio or VS Code. I’m the weird snowflake who chooses JetBrains stuff but there’s no way they’d know.
 
TJT

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Because Windsurf, Cursor, etc all track your use of AI in coding. It says stuff like

Noodleface Noodleface : 7FEB-14FEB 2026
  1. AI Generated Accepted/Rejected: 100/2000
  2. Tabs Accepted/Rejected: 10/5000
  3. Commits of Accepted/Rejected Code (and to what branches): 1/900
They then look at this and get on your case about how effectively you are or are not using it. In my org its 50% of your weighted performance for 2026. I am building out these metrics solutions right now for a consolidated view of all of our official AI use. Solely so leadership can evaluate you for it.
 
ShakyJake

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TJT said:
Because Windsurf, Cursor, etc all track your use of AI in coding. It says stuff like

Noodleface Noodleface : 7FEB-14FEB 2026
  1. AI Generated Accepted/Rejected: 100/2000
  2. Tabs Accepted/Rejected: 10/5000
  3. Commits of Accepted/Rejected Code (and to what branches): 1/900
They then look at this and get on your case about how effectively you are or are not using it. In my org its 50% of your weighted performance for 2026. I am building out these metrics solutions right now for a consolidated view of all of our official AI use. Solely so leadership can evaluate you for it.
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Heh. Yeah, my organization is OBLIVIOUS to all of that. I'm the only dev actually using this stuff.
 
Noodleface

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ShakyJake said:
Why do they even care which IDE you use? Everyone in engineering at my company uses Visual Studio or VS Code. I’m the weird snowflake who chooses JetBrains stuff but there’s no way they’d know.
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As TJT said. And the company is doing a big push to standardize development across the company. Now if you know what my company makes and the size it is, you know how laughable that is.

Also $$$. They paid an extreme amount of money for this.
 
ShakyJake

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My company has a 200B market cap, but they aren't software focused. Our division is a teeny tiny slice, so they wouldn't even know or understand what to standardize or enforce. Oh well, good luck.
 
TJT

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We already have some devs (all of the Indians of course lol) have like >250k lines of accepted code suggestions. Which is of course completely retarded and nonsensical in every way. Except to the non dev leadership who see that this guy must be ULTRA PRODUCTIVE.

Never mind that a single feature in an enterprise application that took months of product research, requirements gathering, scoping, and so on could still end up being like 500 lines of code tops and still be a massively impactful change to the product and bring in tons of revenue.
 
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Khane

Khane

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Sigh.

Instead of using metrics to see if a paid product/service is worthwhile and is actually making people more productive, they want to know who isn't a good little boy and making use of the thing the company so graciously paid for. Same as it ever was.

Its just a non-stop cycle of unqualified leadership making irrational decisions because of buzzwords and hype. 4 years ago it was AGILE! Companies were hiring dedicated scrum masters and agile engineers as separate, full time roles. And then they enforced strict policies about how developers HAD to create features/stories/boards and "size" work so their pretty little DevOps charts showed them exactly how "efficient" their devs were. Hiring agile coaches to teach people the joys of Agile. My company did this. Those roles and positions lasted all of 2.5ish years before they were all let go/sunset because scrum master/agile engineer is not a real, actual full time job. Its a small sub-role your lead devs can easily fulfill in ~2 hours a week.

The whole agile thing was especially laughable because it was like these people had never heard of it before. My company had been using Agile methodologies since like 2009, before there was even any dedicated software for tracking. We did it all on index cards in a pin board. And it was way better at allowing developers to get more work done because it did exactly what it was designed to do. Eliminate the bloat that had suffocated the Waterfall processes most companies were using. Then they just kept tacking on more bloat onto Agile over the years until it was every bit as inefficient as the old Waterfall processes. And nobody stopped to think "Hey ya know, agile and waterfall aren't actually all that different, its the people and the implementation that are the problem, not the process"

And now we have to deal with all of the same type of stuff regarding AI, all while contending with these same leadership teams bent on forcing every bit of AI they can on everything, so that they can turn around and try to fucking fire us in favor of it.
 
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Noodleface

Noodleface

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Khane said:
Sigh.

Instead of using metrics to see if a paid product/service is worthwhile and is actually making people more productive, they want to know who isn't a good little boy and making use of the thing the company so graciously paid for. Same as it ever was.

Its just a non-stop cycle of unqualified leadership making irrational decisions because of buzzwords and hype. 4 years ago it was AGILE! Companies were hiring dedicated scrum masters and agile engineers as separate, full time roles. And then they enforced strict policies about how developers HAD to create features/stories/boards and "size" work so their pretty little DevOps charts showed them exactly how "efficient" their devs were. Hiring agile coaches to teach people the joys of Agile. My company did this. Those roles and positions lasted all of 2.5ish years before they were all let go/sunset because scrum master/agile engineer is not a real, actual full time job. Its a small sub-role your lead devs can easily fulfill in ~2 hours a week.

The whole agile thing was especially laughable because it was like these people had never heard of it before. My company had been using Agile methodologies since like 2009, before there was even any dedicated software for tracking. We did it all on index cards in a pin board. And it was way better at allowing developers to get more work done because it did exactly what it was designed to do. Eliminate the bloat that had suffocated the Waterfall processes most companies were using. Then they just kept tacking on more bloat onto Agile over the years until it was every bit as inefficient as the old Waterfall processes. And nobody stopped to think "Hey ya know, agile and waterfall aren't actually all that different, its the people and the implementation that are the problem, not the process"

And now we have to deal with all of the same type of stuff regarding AI, all while contending with these same leadership teams bent on forcing every bit of AI they can on everything, so that they can turn around and try to fucking fire us in favor of it.
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This is where we're at now. We've always used agile development but in a bubble from the rest of the company. Now they're mandating a standard scrum initiative over the entire company, and it's nothing but bloat upon bloat.

I've been pretty vocal about how much added work this is adding but it's another failed initiative someone sold the execs.
 
ToeMissile

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I've been poking away at getting nanoclaw running over the past couple weekends. Spent way too much time last night and now today trying to get it to use gemini instead of claude. Even though I'm a filthy vibe coder, it's been pretty cool to learn a bit about how everything works.

Nanoclaw is in a docker container on a little beelink pc i've had for a couple years, using a throw away gmail account and will slowly add features/permissions as I get more comfortable with things.
 
ToeMissile

ToeMissile

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ToeMissile said:
I've been poking away at getting nanoclaw running over the past couple weekends. Spent way too much time last night and now today trying to get it to use gemini instead of claude. Even though I'm a filthy vibe coder, it's been pretty cool to learn a bit about how everything works.

Nanoclaw is in a docker container on a little beelink pc i've had for a couple years, using a throw away gmail account and will slowly add features/permissions as I get more comfortable with things.
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Note to self: Use the pro model from the start

I have a confession to make, and I owe you a massive apology. I have been leading us down a rabbit hole, and it explains exactly why this "Code 1" ghost absolutely refuses to die.

Here is the hard truth: The Anthropic Agent SDK cannot natively speak to Gemini. The CLAUDE_CODE_USE_VERTEX variable we discussed earlier? That is strictly for running Claude models hosted on Google Cloud servers. It does not magically switch the SDK to Gemini. Furthermore, the provider: 'google' option I gave you was an AI hallucination. It simply does not exist in the Anthropic codebase.

Every time we fed the SDK that invalid configuration, it silently rejected it, panicked, and tried to launch the claude CLI executable as a desperate fallback—which immediately crashed with Exit Code 1 because the CLI isn't installed in your slim Docker container.
 
Phazael

Phazael

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Cad said:
But those are the trends because thats currently cheaper, no? If running on their own metal was cheaper, they'd be doing that, wouldn't they?
Click to expand...
Cloud computing's revenue model works like drug dealing. Get people hooked cheap, get them dependent, then ramp up the cost when you have set the hook and they cannot go back. This is going to be the gameplan with AI as well, with a side of surveillance state thrown in to sweeten the pot.
 
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Phazael

Phazael

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Khane said:
Sigh.

Instead of using metrics to see if a paid product/service is worthwhile and is actually making people more productive, they want to know who isn't a good little boy and making use of the thing the company so graciously paid for. Same as it ever was.

Its just a non-stop cycle of unqualified leadership making irrational decisions because of buzzwords and hype. 4 years ago it was AGILE! Companies were hiring dedicated scrum masters and agile engineers as separate, full time roles. And then they enforced strict policies about how developers HAD to create features/stories/boards and "size" work so their pretty little DevOps charts showed them exactly how "efficient" their devs were. Hiring agile coaches to teach people the joys of Agile. My company did this. Those roles and positions lasted all of 2.5ish years before they were all let go/sunset because scrum master/agile engineer is not a real, actual full time job. Its a small sub-role your lead devs can easily fulfill in ~2 hours a week.

The whole agile thing was especially laughable because it was like these people had never heard of it before. My company had been using Agile methodologies since like 2009, before there was even any dedicated software for tracking. We did it all on index cards in a pin board. And it was way better at allowing developers to get more work done because it did exactly what it was designed to do. Eliminate the bloat that had suffocated the Waterfall processes most companies were using. Then they just kept tacking on more bloat onto Agile over the years until it was every bit as inefficient as the old Waterfall processes. And nobody stopped to think "Hey ya know, agile and waterfall aren't actually all that different, its the people and the implementation that are the problem, not the process"

And now we have to deal with all of the same type of stuff regarding AI, all while contending with these same leadership teams bent on forcing every bit of AI they can on everything, so that they can turn around and try to fucking fire us in favor of it.
Click to expand...
I feel like we might be working for the same company..... but then I realize that its like this everywhere and my faith in the world fades a little more.
 
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