Don't fall into the anti-AI hype

Re:Don't fall into the anti-AI hype by daxfohl on Monday January 12, 2026 @01:49AM (#46584964)

Could be. Most projects I've worked on tend to span multiple services though, so I think AI would struggle more trying to understand and coordinate across all those services versus having all the logic in a single deployable instance.

The way I see feature development in the future is, PM creates a dev cluster (also much easier with a monolith), has AI implement a bunch of features to spec, AI provides some feedback and gets input on anywhere it might conflict with existing functionality, whether eventual consistency is okay, which pieces are performance criticial, etc., and provides the implementation, a bunch of tests for review, and errata about where to find observability data, design decisions considered and chosen, etc. PM does some manual testing across various personas and products (along with PMs from those teams), has AI add feature flags, launches. The feature flag rollout ends up being the long-pole, since generally the product team needs to monitor usage data for some time before increasing the rollout percentage.

So I see that kind of workflow as being a lot easier in a monolithic service. Granted, that's a few years down the road though, before we have AI reliable enough to do that kind of work.

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Re:Don't fall into the anti-AI hype by catlifeonmars on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @01:34AM (#46597887)

> Most projects I've worked on tend to span multiple services though, so I think AI would struggle more trying to understand and coordinate across all those services versus having all the logic in a single deployable instance.

1. At least CC supports multiple folders in a workspace, so that’s not really a limitation.

2. If you find you are making changes across multiple services, then that is a good indication that you might not have the correct abstraction on the service boundary. I agree that in this case a monolith seems like a better fit.

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Re:Don't fall into the anti-AI hype by daxfohl on Tuesday January 13, 2026 @10:40PM (#46612035)

Agreed on both counts. Though for the first one it's still easier to implement things when bugs create compile or local unit/integration test errors rather than distributed service mismatches that can only be caught with extensive distributed e2e tests and a platform for running them, plus the lack of distribution cuts down significantly on the amount of code, edge cases, and deployment sequencing that needs to be taken into account.

For the second, yeah, but IME everything starts out well-factored, but almost universally evolves into spaghetti over time. The main advantage monoliths have is that they're safer to refactor across boundaries. With distributed services, there are a lot more backward-compatibility guarantees and concerns you have to work through, and it's harder to set up tests that exercise everything e2e across those boundaries. Not impossible, but hard enough that it usually requires a dedicated initiative.

Anyway, random thoughts.

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