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Comment by faangguyindia | Hacker News Reader

It's not doomerism. I've seen this happen at companies.

I was talking to a guy who wanted uptime monitoring. So, he told the executive who called the uptimerobot but then other guy rolled out his uptime robot using AI in 60 minutes and deployed along with centralized logging and it costs the company only $5 VPS.

And honestly it works just as good, I've seen companies are refusing to pay for external tools and building leaner version using AI.

You can build a SaaS faster now but the need for SaaS is on decline.

I've moved to deploying on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, why? Because devops is completely reduced to few minutes worth of work using agents.

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You don't need AI for that. Just deploy Uptime Kuma or similar to a VPS and job done. I can do that in about 15 min vs. your 60 min.

Of course, this is not a production-grade deployment. To get there, I'd need to build images on pipelines, scan them, test them, publish artefacts, write up the IaC to manage the cloud resources, add monitoring around the solution, ...

Deploying a simple piece of software on a custom server was never difficult or slow to do.

You need to invest time in learning its configuration and features you probably won't even need.

Ok, 30 minutes.

Isn't it too early to declare the vibe coded uptime monitoring as "good" from a business standpoint? NIH syndrome has always been a thing and I don't see how the downsides of creating bespoke systems have changed in the LLM-era. You're now stuck maintaining this "genius" solution, LLMs or not, and onboarding devs/users gets harder the more churn you have.

It's 100 lines of code, how hard is it to maintain? It's absolutely better than paying for enterprise license of Uptime robo

Okay, so AI probably wasn't critical to crafting a 100 lines of what I'm assuming is python or some other scripting language that pings a url. Second, I don't think 100 lines is going to be as robust as some pre-packaged monitoring solution (open source or enterprise tier) which has a dashboard and auth story baked in along with proper documentation.

If that script works for your use case then great, but I don't see how LLMs were a game changer here.

Big companies would have rolled out their own anyway, but now 2-3 person companies are also not paying for tools like uptime robots. That's the development LLM brought

Those are some famous last words if I’ve ever heard them.

Some things are better when they are outsourced because other companies specialized for that problem set. Just like you won't roll your own cryptography, you won't and can't do everything in-house.

> So, he told the executive who called the uptimerobot but then other guy rolled out his uptime robot using AI in 60 minutes and deployed along with centralized logging and it costs the company only $5 VPS.

i'm a sysadmin, so i usually watch these things from the side and usually i get called one or two months in to clean up the mess (it happens almost every time).

what you have described is funny to me because uptime monitoring for websites (and also other stuff) is pretty much the use case for prometheus' black-box exporter (https://github.com/prometheus/blackbox_exporter).

assuming you work at a decent company and already have a decent monitoring system (prometheus/alertmanager) it takes 5 minutes to deploy and maybe ten to configure.

if you already have infrastructure then it's basically free. if you already have a kubernetes cluster then it's practically already managed.

> I've moved to deploying on bare metal from OVH and Hertzner, why? Because devops is completely reduced to few minutes worth of work using agents.

at a small scale... maybe. in my experience as soon as you start to reach a decent scale, you'll need experienced engineers (software engineers, system engineers) to actually be at the steering wheel.

> the need for SaaS is on decline

For 5 minutes. The need for cheap SaaS that one person can build and has no uptime requirements or security requirements or legal requirements or ongoing maintenance requirements is indeed declining.

Eh, this said I think SaaS offering had gotten overpriced. Coupled with things like they put up stickers that say "We R havin S3curity" rather than actually having secure systems, oh and constant price increases and methods of locking you into their services there was a need for some pushback in the market.

The reverse Dropbox curlftpfs comment.

$5 VPS + your AI subscription?

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