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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

I moved two servers, one from Linode and the other from DO to Hetzner a few months ago, with similar savings. The best part was that the two servers had tens of different sites running, implemented in different languages, with obsolete libraries, MySQL and Redis instances. A total mess. Well: Claude Code migrated it all, sometimes rewriting parts when the libraries where no longer available. Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.

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IMO nobody was paying for magic compute. they're paying to not touch ten years of glue.

if agents eat that glue, the moat gets thin fast.

> agents eat that glue

No wonder they hallucinate :)

It's when they sniff the glue, then things get wild.

It's been like 90% glue since perl took over.

Glue: the dark matter of software

https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft...

Yeah, at the last job there was a single outdated external wiki server left sitting in DO for those kinds of reasons while everything updated and internal had moved already (if not twice). If it hadn't become such a security risk it would never have been moved.

The problem is a lot of this glue is proprietary by design at the various cloud services. I realize there are open source and alternative abstractions for a lot of of the same services, but there’s still quite a bit of glue if you’re on AWS, for example, and looking to move to bare metal.

But maybe I’m just thinking of the current capabilities of agents, and if we fast forward a couple years, even removing these abstractions or migrating will be very low friction.

But you can run most of the glue on your own dedicated instances.

I run k8s on a bunch of dedicated servers that are super cheap and I have all bells and whistles - just tell your coding agent to do it. You can literally design the thing you would never do yourself and it works brilliantly.

Postgres running on dedicated hardware replicated and with wal backups - easy just tell codebuff (my harness of choice) to do it. Then any number of firewalls, load balancers, bastion servers, etc. if you can imagine it , codebuff will implement it.

Don’t forget staples and the tape too. LLMs have a weakness for paperclips, hope we don’t end up on that path

There's an "Operation Paperclip" joke hidden in here somewhere.

Wow a Claude add embedded into a Hetzner add.

How deep does this go?

"ad", with a single "d".

So it's a Claude ad inside a Hetzner ad inside a decent grammar ad.

Ad for which elementary school?

Come on can you really nitpick grammar when your original message contains: "when the libraries where[sic] no longer available"

Btw this type of grammar error can be found by proofreading your posts with ChatGPT powered OpenClaw assistant.

I was joking. I notoriously write bad English but don't like using LLMs for writing. It removes personality.

> I notoriously write bad English...

You mean that you write in English badly. :-)

You forgot that this entire forum is a VC/incubator ad. Its ads all the way down.

Don't forget the ad hominem

The amount of ad populum around this issue certainly reaches ad absurdum levels.

By this logic your most recent comment was just an ad for Netflix.

I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments. This account's operation was going on development subs complaining about how good Claude's latest model is and how awful it is being afraid of losing one's job to AI.

I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek and the poster here is kinda known, but this kind of astroturfing is a new low and it's everywhere on forums such as these.

I was really confused, then, realized the person you’re replying to misspelled “ad” as "add", and you’re moving forward with the premises GP is an ad, and this HN submission is an ad. Then, you share you saw a Reddit account on a gamedev subreddit complaining AI is too good, & they're worried they won’t have a job, and you believe that Reddit account must have been an ad for AI.

Just noting for fellow just-waking-up people

(edit: OP edited)

The whole internet is like this now, and it's only just getting started. Makes me sick tbh, and I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in.

For those who remember Digg, the recently relaunched a new version and shut it down almost immediately. They were getting hammered with AI bots when it was realized the Digg apparently still has good SEO. The explain it right on homepage.

https://digg.com/

They explained it with an AI generated post

> I am still questioning if this is the kind of industry I want to work in

I'm not. I stick around for the popcorn, and I'm not gonna miss the schadenfreude in a few years.

I see a lot of these posts on Reddit, too, but I don't think it's actually Anthropic or Claude doing it. It's the same old Reddit karma farmers picking up on the latest trends. They've always combined headlines with ragebait to build karma and now LLM bots make it easier than ever.

It's too bad Reddit allows accounts to hide their comment history now. That was an easy way to identify bot accounts before they started allowing accounts to hide their post history

That is a pity but on the bright side it also helps people to avoid being stalked and harassed.

I think it probably is claude and anthropic. It kicked off in earnest towards the end of last year when "AI bubble" news stories peaked.

They're incredibly exposed to investor sentiment and were likely panicking around sept/oct/nov time when AI bubble stories were trending.

These posts were really consistent and repetitive - similar language about "scary good" models and fear of losing jobs.

> the same old Reddit karma farmers

What's the point of these Internet points?

Numbers go bigger. Plenty of games based in that.

The accounts are worth something later (e.g. for spreading opinions or promoting something) and can be sold.

Why would a 1000 karma bot account be more valuable than a 100 karma? As long as you pass the threshold for not being shadow banned in most subs because of low karma, it’s irrelevant.

On HN for example, karma is a relatively stronger signal of account history, on Reddit there are multiple million+ karma accounts that are quite obviously bots.

You can still look at comment history, e.g. https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/

I've been warning people of Anthropic's astroturfing for a while now. The amount of "Insert latest model/Claude Code is scary. I'm worried about my job" posts, followed by a doom ridden writing about how their job was automated and 30 dudes got fired and the person is pivoting into plumbing or something or working at Mcdonalds, is just too suspicious not to note. Sometimes it's more covert. They don't mention any provider/model. Sometimes there's a subtle insert somewhere in the body, Opus, Claude, etc.

It's not necessarily astroturfing. There is a seismic shift under way regarding how things get done in this business, and if you don't acknowledge it, that's weird in itself.

I've certainly noticed a seismic shift in how bad support and updates have gotten with some 3rd party vendors we use, and the answer they come back with is always that they're experimenting with AI. Not saying AI isn't part of the job now, but it is getting seriously over hyped and over extended.

It's absolutely not seismic. If you've used AI for a little bit, you'll realize it's good at writing boilerplate code. Any complex logic, and you better re-read and correct the code a few times until you trust it.

Of course if all you do is "host wordpress website" (like 80% of what's "webdev" do), it will work. Now the issue is that the last 20% are the hardest to cover, and current AI methods will not get there (you need some much more complex methods, like being able to integrate logic with learning-based ML, to do this)

> I have just seen with my own eyes Claude astroturfing on a gamedev subreddit from a botting account that was picked up by Google so I could see a few of their other comments.

Where's the link? I mean, why would anyone take your word for it? No one can tell who you are as well. If there are posts in a subreddit then it would be interesting to see them.

Its certainly a choice to accuse antirez of all people

True, let's not criticize those saints of ours.

I think it is more the other direction. I asked Claude how to save money on my cloud costs, and it suggested migrating from DO to Hetzner.

I mean if it were anyone else, yeah I might agree, but I think Salvatore is being genuine here (and have seen Claude do a similarly surprising job fixing ops issues).

I don't think so. I think he's clearly abusing language (saying "Claude Code migrated the stufff", rather than "I migrated the stuff after using Claude to help write boilerplate, then I went on double-checking it, testing it, and then running it")

I don't think you've nailed it either. He SHOULD be saying "54 days ago, I powered on my computer and opened a terminal. From my editor I reviewed my code files and realized I had quite a mess on my hands. Realizing it was the year A.D. 2026, I decided to fire up a modern tool. I typed "claude" into my terminal. As it launched I told it I wanted helping taking my running programs and moving them from the virtual private servers I was running in Linode (inc) and Digital Ocean (co) to Hetzner (LLC). As Claude used it's tool use abilities it read the files and made suggestions on how to do the migrations, it indicated that it could go ahead and copy the files and run the needed commands but I would need to give it permission first. I granted it permission. Once it said the services were running, I instructed it to test that they were accessible and reliable while I reviewed the glowing new code it had written. In summary, with the help of Claude Code I was able to redeploy 37 services in Hetzner."

I think the parent has a point. For how many other accomplishments is the tool framed as the responsible party? We don't say "cranes built the skyscraper", people did. Why do we shift accountability when it comes to AI?

For clarity and accuracy, in the hopes that the person reading it interprets in good faith.

Because it shows you are hip and trendy and MAYBE you deserve a job in the AI era

If you vaguely describe to the crane what you want built, and it builds it, then I'd say the crane built it.

On Monday a crane company announces it’s pivoting to AI, followed by a quick 600% boost to its stock price. I wouldn’t even be surprised at this point.

Except that's probably not what happened for the comment we're replying to, and that's exactly the point...

On the other hand he has totally drunk the Kool-AI(d).

It would seem that way for sure, if it was just a random anon posting it, but the person you're replying to is the creator of Redis so I feel it's more likely a genuine opinion/experience rather than a Claude ad...

This is the redis guy you're replying to, I doubt he's on Claude's payroll

Do folks see a mention of Claude as indicative of an ad? I usually say it because at work we've got a couple different options and I like to mention which one in particular I was using. But maybe I'll just start saying AI on forums unless someone asks me to specify.

I doubt if someone who has 30000+ karma waited for this precise post to submit a "clever" claude ad surreptitiously to draw you in.

It's quite telling there are no other recommendations for "bare metal hosting" on HN other than Hetzner. I guess no others in the world exist?

Or maybe it's just advertising/astro-turfing. At some point it has to be obvious.

Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

They really can't help themselves showing how they didn't put any effort doing a thing.

Yeah, OP is famous for never having put effort into anything, just an AI shill /s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvatore_Sanfilippo

This whole thread is hilarious.

> They really can't help themselves showing how they didn't put any effort doing a thing.

I would be proud to show that I managed to take one of the most radical changes we can do to a system, which would otherwise be practically unthinkable, and use a tool to make it trivial ton pull off.

You may not be interested in AI, but AI is interested in you.

I use that phrase with "done with Microsoft," but it fits well here too!

They didn't make it about AI, they mentioned a tool that helped with the migration. I find it relevant and helpful to know.

I don't see it as much different from "I used script X to do it" or something.

Excuse my ignorance, but how is that migration (especially of older libraries that are apparently being rewritten) not just a copy/paste action from one server to the other? When I build software to deploy it it includes everything it requires library wise. At least the few things I've deployed so far.

Sometimes you need library version X, which uses a compiled binary for the platform, which requires C library version Y, which requires glibc version Z, which is deprecated on the current version of the OS, etc etc etc.

Or you can update the app to remove the dependency on the library.

But honestly, this is what containers or VMs are built for in the first place.

You have to copy data across, and confirm that everything worked correctly, and if you're being fancy about it you need to freeze writes to the old server while you are migrating and then unfreeze after you've directed traffic to the new server. It's not trivial.

The author knows that AI can cause social disruption of the kind that siphons even more money to the rich. To that he has thoughts and prayers[1].

Extreme pragmatism for AI converts is just instant gratification for your hacker itch without looking any further.

That’s why people get fatigued by yet another “but now with AI”. In isolation they are just solving this one problem.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46587277

I don't see what checking a file system has to do with anything either.

> Not every fscking story has to be about AI.

It might surprise you to learn that nowadays there are a lot of people using LLM code assistants. Those who do can also use them to help them write blog posts.

You are going to have a hard time living in the future.

Linode is going to lose my business in the next couple months as well. Been there over a decade, have referred countless customers to them, but they’ve kept bumping up prices over and over and I can get a dedicated server at Hetzner or other places with 8x the memory, dedicated NVMe disks, dedicated CPU for cheaper.

Sure you lose a little of the benefit of a “virtual” server which can be migrated but Hetzner’s support has always been super fast and capable, should I wind up in a situation where I’ve got downtime.

... expect Hetzner raising prices in ... 3 ... 2 ... 1

They just did a massive increase: https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availabi...

Still vatsly cheaper than cloud, and comparable to OVH now.

Linode was bought by Akamai couple years ago.

Sure, and then you realize it deleted the db to "simplify the migration" lol

Obviously I agree that AI can be useful to write boilerplate, but it's in no way something you should use blindly when trying to do a migration or anything touching prod

So, to be more precise: no, "Claude Code didn't migrate it all". Claude Code helped you write boilerplate so that you could migrate

Claude gave him the courage to do the migration.

And, recent research suggests that anthropomorphization may actually be positively correlated with intelligence.

it deleted the db to "simplify the migration". That was real scenario of at least one Sev 1 outages in "leading cloud provider".

I decided to put some tiny data online for a sync service for myself. I didn't want to learn some of the things that needed to be involved and had an agent do it for me. I wasn't willing to risk my real server incase the agent left security holes.

I got a dedicated VPS just for the one thing and it did everything. I don't have a perfect understanding of possible openings that might have been left by misconfiguration. The data in question is so trivial that it doesn't matter to me if it's read so long as my VPS doesn't become party to a botnet and I can monitor to make sure that doesn't happen and shut it down if it does.

I’ve been experimenting with letting a local agent manipulate my remote servers using https://bower.sh/zmx-ai-portal

What’s exciting is how simple cli tools can be so impactful to dev workflows

I've been using Codex to make Ansible scripts to setup various servers. Its a nice in between.

Now imagine you can do that with a local model. You're basically breaking lockin on _Every_ end. Simply beautiful. A digital guillotine for the digital elite!

> Today complex migrations are much simpler to perform, which, I believe, will increase the mobility across providers a lot.

Syntax did a nice episode on this topic recently. They went over where it works well, and where it does not work well.

https://syntax.fm/show/992/migrating-legacy-code-just-got-ea...

Let me guess: the Pro subscription was totally sufficient even using the expensive model and it only took an hour?

yeah, everything is about to be repriced.

I too, am bravely using Claude for more DevOps. I run all of my virtual machines on proxmox atop bare metal servers I own and I’m just blown away at how quickly Claude can optimize and set up entire new networks across all of these machines. Truly feels like a coworker or well paid sysadmin.

"servers I own" - that's a temporary glitch and AI will fix it for ... someone else.

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