Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that generates infra from code

Re:Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that gener... by ForHackernews on Friday November 14, 2025 @08:26AM (#45926503)

This an interesting idea, but I'd be skeptical of having this much coupling between application code and infrastructure. It's like an anti-12 Factor App.

It might make sense for something like a "serverless" app where the units of the business logic are intended to map directly onto cloud provider entities.

It reminds me of https://aws.github.io/chalice/ but cloud-agnostic and Typescript in place of Python

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Re:Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that gener... by andout_ on Friday November 14, 2025 @08:46AM (#45926639)

I'd argue it's the opposite of coupling. Your application code references logical resources (database connection, pub/sub topic, bucket) without knowing anything about the underlying infrastructure. Encore extracts these needs and a configurable planner transforms them into actual infrastructure.

The same application code can run locally (Docker), on AWS (RDS, SQS, Lambda), or GCP (Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run) without changes. That's less coupling than explicitly configuring cloud-specific resources in Terraform or even using cloud SDKs directly.

Re: Chalice - similar idea but Chalice is AWS-only and focused on serverless functions. Encore is cloud-agnostic and works for any backend architecture (monoliths, microservices, containers, functions).

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Re:Show HN: Encore – Type-safe back end framework that gener... by ForHackernews on Friday November 14, 2025 @11:42AM (#45928625)

But you're inverting the dependency-injection pattern (dependency-extraction?) rather than feeding your app the things it needs to run, you're encoding the dependencies directly into the application code. Maybe it works great in practice, I haven't tried it, but it looks brittle and hard to test.

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