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Comment by moritzwarhier | Hacker News Reader

> Vibe Coding failed me

Hm, edited out snark. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, and it's good to warn against.

What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap. Another edit: businesses and hobbyists are different beasts of course. You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap. For traditional shared hosting, this is mostly a solved problem AFAIK.

That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.

The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...

ehm, no thanks.

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“laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap” really sounds to me like something that could and should be fixed by the market.

I agree, up until the question is how transparent the risks are.

For example, I think that OpenAI's system of incentivizing automated credit purchases borders on being predatory. Not because it would be hidden info. Just because the product is clearly aimed at consumers who do things that they might not fully understand.

For me, I don't habe any issues with their current design.

But for John Doe vibe-coding their nutrition analysis app, I feel it's wrong to advertise automatic payments and long-running tasks without providing a clear fee cap option.

It's similar to gambling.

"The market" is not a benevolent fairy godmother with your best interest at heart.

It is a machine that optimizes profit and absolutely nothing else. It does not and cannot consider what is "good" or "right" or even "legal" unless and until one of those things directly and indisputably hurts profits too much.

This is magical thinking. "The market" is fundamentally incapable of making things better for you, the consumer.

All the market members are interested in you NOT having a hard cap.

If you have oligopoly without the regulations who do you think benefits more from that?

I think the OP just points out that if you never read the code you are playing with your wallet. It's a gamble and in this case it resulted in considerable losses for an individual.

Yes, and it's valuable to share. I'll edit out the "Weird article" part if still possible.

> You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap.

Why not? Just because you can scale to million or billions doesn't mean that you should do it automatically without any supervision. Just like because your BMW M5 can reach a top speed of 305 km/h, you shouldn't drive at that speed all the time. Heck, some should never drive at that speed.

OK, I meant "auto-scaling", which is what most of these dev-aimed services we are talking about offer, right?

Anyway, reliability is already enough of a criterion when you set up a site that does some expensive thing in an infinite loop, gets (D-)DoSed, etc.

When you're trying to develop a product to sell, these are all things to look out yourself and that's fine I guess.

Just find it sad that the providers of these services apparently often don't make clear to their customers the billing responsibilities that they enter, although technically, sure, it's all written in the terms / pricing.

Auto-scale to one hundred bucks cause I'm a poor student and that's all I have. Auto-scale to a million cause I'm a big corporation and I can deal with a bad fiscal year. By the way, I wonder how well is the debt collection auto-scaling going so to speak.

I think some warnings would be welcome.

[ x ] Auto-scale to my level of abilities

  Understood. Are you very smart?
  Just say the word.

> | Yes! Also rich!

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