A year ago, it was not sure if the core companies around programming would move to more agent enabled workflow. Companies like JetBrains.
I love their products. But it's clear now that programming is now spec management and how do we control agents. I don't need JetBrains for that.
And spec management will become less technical as models get better. What does JetBrains think is the long term goal for this product? I don't think it'll make any sense in a few months.
Forgive the skepticism: Is this a harness that sits beside a language runtime, looks at traces/logs and uses an LLM to optimize code for given hardware?
It looks interesting but I am really unable to see what is so different from a couple days of prompts and digging into a software to optimize it using LLMs.
I do not think OAI/Anthropic make the biggest share of their revenue from subscription. The largest share is from API spends. That is what DeepSeek or others aim for as well.
This is lovely. Tried on speaker, will try with headphones.
I have a chicken farm (and a pig farm but I manage the chickens myself). I want to start a duck farm with a fish pond. Living in a small village and enjoying these things in real life actually changed my life in ways that I cannot explain.
I still (get agents to) write software but my daily life is around the farm and village life (mostly a Sun centric routine). I have to share a bunch of photos, not doing that enough. And I want to record all the bird sounds. Perhaps host a livestream. I live here; the home stay is by the host family: https://maps.app.goo.gl/TEUSdwvko2DRWmou5
I remember CGI days and I have written tiny web "features" with Perl and C many years ago. All my product backends are now in Rust and SQLite but I use frameworks and libraries. Like Tokio, Auxum/Actix Web, Diesel.
I am not sure I like the idea that the binary will be called by nginx on each request. I prefer the backend binary to have state. A 256 MiB virtual instance is enough for any software shared between friends, family or even a small community.
SQLite backups are easy. I really like how I am building web apps these days. Been with PHP for 7 years and then Python for 10+ years. Single binaries are awesome. I am looking at multi-server backends as well, still 256 - 512 MiB per instance but with a shared Redis. Still with SQLite. Should easy enable medium sized business software.
There was a recent Show HN project that claimed to be 'self-hosted', and the installation included something like 6 service subscription dependencies. That's just a SaaS with more steps.
I’ve had to tell agents working on a personal project that will never see another living soul to stop referring to it as self hosted when it requires tavily, fish audio, deepseek, and anthropic API keys.
"Self-hosting is the practice of running a website or service on a home server instead of a web hosting service outside of the administrator's own control."
And then basically contradicts itself in the next paragraph:
"The practice of self-hosting web services became more feasible with the development of cloud computing and virtualization technologies, which enabled users to run their own servers on remote hardware or virtual machines."
In any case, I think the generally accepted definition of self-hosting has expanded over the years to include software that you're running on rented hardware in someone else's data center.
I think the opposite. 20 years ago self hosting almost always meant "in a data centre" but as home internet got better people started to think "or maybe in my basement" and now it's swung so far that a few think if it's not in your basement it's not self hosting
Self hosting wasn’t popular nomenclature back then, but it was common for people to host web and mail on at home on DSL or even dial-up (ISDN or even analog if you were bold) 20-30 years ago.
I only use Wikipedia occasionally but this is seriously the worst article I've ever seen. It switches the definition between "running on my own hardware" and "running it in the cloud" multiple times. It's been pointed out in a discussion about the article several months ago but nobody bothered to correct it.
Which is what has been done in pieces and argued about 10000 times to make this abomination. I guarantee there is someone watching this article 24/7 that will revert it the moment you update it
Having worked with cloud for almost 2 decades. The term self-hosted is indeed what you describe. The opposite is "managed services", e.g. services that are packaged by the vendor without the need to manage auxiliary needs like CPU, memory, disk, log rotation, etc.
I am not an expert, just an engineer with years of experience. I switched to Rust a couple years ago. I was still learning before LLM generated Rust was good enough that I stopped coding by hand.
Again, not a language expert, but: if you can describe your domain or business logic as clearly as a strongly typed language with a rich type system, most of your issues are gone. Enum and Struct with all the other core types plus the match expressions does most of my mental heavy lifting. I do not even track any of the recent language changes.
What I really care about is the shape of what I am describing - does it translate to code? How much do I lose in the translation? I want to try other languages, particularly Lisp but Rust is at this moment my choice. I have my own UI framework (1), my own provenance based business domain generator and a few simple language parsers.
I am building apps where you can, for example, throw a CSV file (2), ask questions in English and get answers - without using an LLM. Parser. Rust is no doubt a great language to express - not as a programmer, but as a prompter. I do not write the code. I ask LLMs to generate it using only basic knowledge of Rust and its type system. This will be the key to work with LLMs for majority of people.
I do not feel good about this. I really want SQLite (and the Turso re-write of it) to win for tiny apps that people will build more and more with LLMs. Desktop or server. Even serverless.
The core tech is open source so that is good. Will it stay? I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?
Thanks but you do understand this makes it hard for folks to select Turso. With all good intentions parent companies kill acquisitions.
Supabase is hosted Postgres with wings. Turso seemed like it would be the same but using SQLite based approach.
So either Supabase now uses the Turso sync + Postgres or something that needs Turso or abandons it. Not sure and I am not asking, just sharing my thoughts.
No, I truly don't understand that.
It is true that some acquisitions fail, but most of the ones you see failing are doomed from the start and are a way for the founder to exit, acquhire, etc.
I had a never-ending host of options at my hand. Turso grew revenue > 5x this year. I had no reason to accept an offer that wouldn't have a great chance of success.
SQLite/Turso fits my own agent/harness mental model very well but I am, as folks in the valley would say, a bit of an anti-capitalist.
I am working on my own agents that are anti-tokenmaxxers. SQLite/Turso is part of the deployed app architecture from my harness. Thanks a lot for taking the time.
I also have my own doubts about this acquisition, but as I explore sqlite-per-user models I'm also seeing benefits to having some central control plane. I thought they would've made a natural fit on Cloudflare.
Did you check out the post? Supabase sees Turso as the answer to workloads not well-suited for Postgres. This seems like a decent Yes, And proposition.
yup — we see Turso/SQLite as complementary to Postgres for specific use cases. The blog post doesn't mention it yet, but this will power our smallest instance — "Spark" https://x.com/saltcod/status/2106078176464036044
I am fully onboard with LLM generated code if that is what you mean. I literally get client work titled "Need Claude led Engineer". SQLite is a great option for the LLM enabled future.
> The core tech is open source so that is good. Will it stay? I guess Turso hosting was not making enough revenue?
You just answered your own question. Why would anyone pay for Turso if the core of the software is available for free and being licenced permissively under MIT?
Because they don't want to self-host/manage it. It looks like this is an acquisition, not an acquihire, so it's unclear whether or not Turso was making enough to sustain itself or not. There are plenty of companies out there who release open source software and make money off of hosted/managed offerings of it.
Liability. Compliance. Chain-of-responsibility. Risk. This has always been the case in business, and it will continue to be the case (at least until artificial intelligence actually replaces that need).
I have been programming for about 30 years (including school years). Professionally for 18 years.
Can anyone tell me why we have 40 or more programming languages, with about 10 popular ones? Then about 20 frameworks in each of them. And add another 200 popular libraries for each language? This matrix make no sense till you realize - it is preferences all the way down.
Most of us engineers have built our own mental model of programming. We are all right. But the users do not care. LLMs are here to produce code closer and closer to the metal as needed. They can sit and create a graph out of every spec, use an AST that they develop and run on the CPU if they have to. They will do it. No amount of us discussing will stop that.
Programming is going to be re-invented. I do not think the current ways to write software will even matter.
Your comment started strong. "30 years programming experience", asking interesting questions, I really hoped you'd say something profound... then it went down to whatever this is. The reason there are many programming languages and frameworks isn't programmer's preferences but rather their utility in solving specific problems. Take Prolog for example. Can you technically do what it does in JS? Yes. Can you do frontend in Prolog? Probably yes, but you wouldn’t [ab]use one tool when the other is due.
Your argument reads as someone who claims to be a professional but opens the toolbox and says: "do you know why there are so many tools?" And then goes to answer: "because I like it so"! What the ... ?
If a language is Turing complete, why build another language right on top? Most of the interpreted languages are running an engine written in C. Was C not enough? Or was it that we needed abstraction?
It is nice to be in our bubble but if what you said is true, why do we only have like 3 major instruction sets? Why not 40? Programming languages are just easy to create - this is a good thing and we created too many. But it absolutely fractured the industry.
Look at the average job post. There are requirements for system design - good. Algorightms - good. Then it goes into this whole language/framework land. Remembering syntax is literally there in many companies interview. These are preferences. If we understand how a computer executes binary/assembly, the layers above are not as relevant as we have made them.
Yes, we need abstraction. X being written in Y doesn't mean you can build the same systems, with the same adaptability, reliability, and performance, within the same time and cost.
Obviously there are also unnecessary differences between tools, and hiring shouldn't focus on easily transferred skills
I have personally wanted to learn and actually use Lisp. I will get to it, even with all the LLM enabled programming. But yes, this is one of those things.
We have reinvented so many ideas many different ways in many different languages and frameworks simply because we want our flavored version.
What I mean is that a lot of the popular languages have an engine written in C. Fairly common pattern. I get it that we want to abstract but sometimes it feels we just want to avoid dealing with a language that is one layer below.
I agree with what you said, and _sometimes_ it's true, but I still wouldn't call it a "preference". One could argue there isn't a "need" to deliver faster and come up with solutions to problems, but is it a "preference"?
Maybe I'm completely off base here, arguing about semantics.
You can go quite far using a human language to Bash grammar based setup but at some point the input prompts are harder to translate. The OP has existing projects that work with AST quite deeply so I assume they know about that already.
I am building a natural language to CSV/Excel commands for a "wrangler" type desktop app. Same issues. The MVP is being built with parsers of sorts, entirely code generated. Then I want to fine-tune a tiny model at some point.
I love their products. But it's clear now that programming is now spec management and how do we control agents. I don't need JetBrains for that.
And spec management will become less technical as models get better. What does JetBrains think is the long term goal for this product? I don't think it'll make any sense in a few months.
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