For a fraction of the cost of modern cloud

Imagine for a moment that you work as a corporate recruiter, and that you are trying to find your next candidate programmer.

Will you hire a so-called vibe-coder, which has delegated all executive functions to a virtual chatbot. Or will you hire the “wrote the CMS by hand” wizzkid that thinks you are crazy for needing to consult the internet instead of local manpages.

It may just be a gut feeling, but it feels like a lot of cost can be saved by not hiring the first. That there are a lot of hidden costs added to projects in the form of technical debt by choosing for the first.

Further hidden costs would be the choice of frameworks and other tools that are quite niche or still in active development. I have had the delight of choosing a frontend framework more than once, which is not a lightweight decision for a website project. There are a lot of fancy options out there, but for a project with a lot of people the plain choice sticks best. If the website needs to be dynamic, going for React with JavaScript or TypeScript works well as it is well understood how the framework operates; it is battle-tested.

And the same logic can be applied to the selection of tools for cloud infrastructure. Tools like docker are also getting more sophisticated, making it sufficient to make the infrastructure solution work without further tools on top. If all the customer asks for is a sandwich, using ten different kinds of spreads on one slice of bread does not make it better; they will probably just prefer a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Native cluster management exists with docker under swarm mode. And for a lot of projects, that may already be sufficient and also simple to understand. Hold the urge to be fancy, because you might add a bunch of tooling that at the end turns out to be redundant.

In addition, because the internet is full of large configs, chatbots will also sprinkle in a lot of unneeded configurations. So when you want a minimal setup, that is something to keep in mind if you let a chatbot draft up the initial configuration.