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Comment by gabriel-uribe | Hacker News Reader

YMMV but automations eat through the $100-$200 plans, which burn thousands in tokens alone.

I have hourly automations for root cause analysis on customer support issues, daily automations for eg log analysis, weekly & monthly automations for KPI tracking & actioning.

I will say, when I was building side projects that were 1) fairly well defined in scope and 2) without users/need for automations it was much easier to stay under $20/mo plan limits. Now I regularly hit weekly limits and need multiple Max plans

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Most of it doesn't require AI. You could generate automation scripts that do that, except of customer support. People became dependent on AI in places where it never was required and now tech bros are doing the squeeze.

I don't miss the days of scraping through logs or dashboards myself to troubleshoot some latency or malformed data issue that I missed conditionals for.

AI is incredible at finding patterns in otherwise benign stdouts, let alone as it cross-references data streams.

In theory, I don't need most of these automations. But for $200/mo? I will happily reduce my cognitive burden on stuff that doesn't impact the core business and make it easier to keep things gliding smoothly.

When the subsidized plans disappear, I will keep these automations going with the best small models that fit on my laptop.

What I mean is a script that can look through the logs. They are known and deterministic (if you properly handle errors) and you can analyze them statistically. If you don't know what logs your app is outputting, then you have a bigger problem in your hands tbh.

Deterministic scripts are awesome, and they certainly power my internal dashboards.

But I'm a human - I will miss things. I maintain too many apps to have entire codebases in memory at this point. Or to continue monitoring all these streams. Logging is cheap - I log as much as possible because an AI will scan it for me.

I just want scoped pull requests to review proactively against the slew of things that can happen in prod that I didn't account for in my specs (again, from logs, customer issues, etc). I discard most of them. That is fine.

It seems you could use a human instead then? If you have so many apps, you could hire a junior to help you. There is additional satisfaction of bringing new person to the IT too.

Honestly, would love to do that. Main issue is margin. Earning just enough to even consider hiring, but not nearly enough to hire someone great that will stick around. Have tried hiring a few times now, but it hasn't worked out for various reasons.

Kicking the can down the road for now.

The sweet spot is using AI to create those automation scripts, and only hooking AI up to do the high level analysis, and then have it delegate to those scripts.

Honestly, having spent a huge chunk of my career in customer support, 80%+ of the tickets could be solved with a script and not need an AI. Just about every company has a catalog of macros for answering support tickets and once you have a good set, 80% of people just need you to send them a link to the support article where you actually already answered their question in great detail, if they'd bothered to look for it.

This makes sense. Early on most of our support requests were for routine things eg login issues, but now it’s more complex: “this new genAI feature did this weird thing”

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