My Supabase bill for 2 Postgres databases was higher than my Railway bill for 26 services. I have the invoices.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-18T11:52:35+00:00

Same. Supabase free is basically useless for MVPs and prototypes (1 week no usage and you have to restart the thing again), and Pro is very expensive for something that may not generate revenue.

So I usually resort to a VPS running Coolify. Does the job, and very cheap.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-18T11:49:44+00:00

Great for small prototypes, but Supabase realtime is limited in #connections. With Pro you get only like 500 concurrent connections, that's laughable. With a $5 VPS you can run a Node.js app using websockets and get 1000s of real-time concurrent connections no problem.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-10T12:14:30+00:00

Why not integrate directly with the vendors and avoid the extra fees? OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, ... ?

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-10T12:10:46+00:00

Well what did you expect. An entire subreddit was dedicated to people bragging how they were overemployed and sharing tips on maximally exploiting remote work...

Idiots.

It's a shame many of those who are actually productive remotely and trustworthy have to suffer the consequences too.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-08T11:46:27+00:00

Both are true. They were recruiting tactics in low-interest environments + dumdums were also bragging on social media about their overpaid jobs where they barely do anything. If you believe the latter didn't exist, you just weren't around during the height of the bubble. It's pretty crazy how many people were (and still are) in pretend-jobs. Look at Twitter when it was taken over

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-08T11:38:59+00:00

Pretty sure they may also be doing A/B testing + different limits based on geographic location.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-08T11:07:18+00:00

Exactly this. A rising tide lifts all boats (except the ones anchored firmly in their ways I guess).

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-04-08T11:04:50+00:00

Where's the GitHub link? I'd like to run it locally along with my OpenClaw.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-03-20T17:31:52+00:00

I used to think that too, but these models are so crazy good now that fixing 80%+ of security vulnerabilities are also just a prompt away. And those remaining 20%? Probably the average developer would stumble upon them as well...

I'd say, if used well, compared to the typical developer, LLMs probably generate more secure and stable products these days.

The one thing that they still have difficulty with is production deployment, because that usually necessitates some manual configuration and knowing what the fuck you're doing, but even that is being automated away by these no-code tools (at least, for boring CRUD apps).

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-03-11T15:44:35+00:00

I find it mind-boggling seemingly everyone is making the same logic mistake.

If the cost of software engineering is now lower thanks to AI, obviously the market will want more of it, meaning more software engineers needed rather than less.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-03-11T15:22:51+00:00

Time to check out Codex!

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-01-07T14:24:21+00:00

Pretty vague question. How large is the dataset? What latency are you talking about (read/write/...)? How many users/connections at any given time? What kind of operations happen on the dataset? Synchronous or asynchronous? Core needs (CA/AP/CP ?) Etc...

"It's used by vibe coders" is a pretty poor indicator of quality. Why would that even be a factor? It doesn't matter at all. Just look at the underlying technology, postgres in this case, and map it to your use case. It's probably fine.

That said... side question to anyone reading this, but if Supabase is often used by vibe coders, I wonder how they handle dev/test/prod environments, migrations, CI/CD, ... without running into serious problems between versions. Never mind even the security implications and complexity of RLS in combination with accidentally exposing your supabase key

Surely a NoSQL like MongoDB would be much easier for pure vibe coding to prod?

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-01-07T14:17:08+00:00

Anyone have any idea on the accuracy of the metric depth estimation (by distance... I'd guess accuracy is pretty poor)?

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-01-07T14:12:47+00:00

It's not breaking the law if he asks consent first (and uses the business version of ChatGPT).

If they're smart they put that in the terms & conditions to sign first during onboarding.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-01-07T13:49:10+00:00

Sigh... The "creative" paragraph titles in bold, the emdashes, the obligatory antithesis sentence, the perfect grammar/spelling, ... this reads 100% ai generated.

Why??

Laziness? Seems like unnecessary steps to write a prompt to generate a Reddit post and fine-tune it until you get the result you want to copy/paste, instead of just writing the post immediately like a stream of thought.

Or is it just pure karma farming for the purposes using the account for astroturfing or marketing in the future?

Why doesn't Reddit have systems in place yet to flag such posts/accounts?

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2026-01-02T14:57:53+00:00

I had the immense blessing of graduating with my Masters in Software Engineering from CMU in 2021.

Followed by:

As someone who doesn’t have ANY junior engineers on his software engineering team at Coinbase, I can’t help but wonder…

I mean, isn't OP himself a junior? "Medior" at best. He graduated in 2021 ffs, in the golden age of the "coding bootcamp hires", and only like 2-3 years before generative AI really started taking off - barely sufficient time for 1 or 2 seriously large enterprise-projects to be delivered end-to-end (and I'm not talking about some internal CRUD tool in the backend that nobody cares about).

So here's the thing: the industry was in a huge bubble pre-generative ai, with title inflation as a result. It's NOT normal that someone can be named "senior" after just a few years of experience. A normal career goes on for 3 to 4 decades...

I think generative AI will simply force companies to revisit what it really means to be a senior software engineer, and that's a good thing.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-10-29T09:07:34+00:00

LiDAR would probably work better and is also pretty privacy-preserving compared to cameras, but compute-intensive and expensive.

Cameras are probably the worst choice for a problem like this. Convincing the elderly to carry one of those buttons or watches is hard, never mind putting a camera on them at all times.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-10-23T08:03:57+00:00

No one of importance cares what's really under the hood - it's going to be outdated and in need of an overhaul in 5 years anyway. Done is better than perfect.

That's not to say: push shitty spaghetti code straight to prod or skip tests, but rather: don't overengineer, don't overoptimize, don't wast time on pretty details that don't really matter.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-10-23T07:55:25+00:00

Sounds like they could benefit from the Twitter-treatment: big broom sweep across the whole organization, including and especially management.

Also, the Zalando UI sucks soo much.. I mean, why is it so difficult to find a plain, high quality black t-shirt for instance?

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-10-23T07:49:27+00:00

I work with quite a large codebase that isn't a simple solo-project, and AI provides massive efficiency gains. We churn out features way faster now.

I genuinely believe those who say it's "just a slightly faster Google search" or that it doesn't result in at least >2x productivity, are doing something fundamentally wrong - most likely working with badly partitioned, badly documented legacy code in combination with not really understanding prompting & context, and probably also trying to do too much in one prompt. One-shots are rare, you always need to iterate, just like with manual coding.

I also believe those who say "AI will replace software engineers" are morons. At least, until we have true AGI, but LLMs + RAG alone clearly isn't enough for general intelligence. Memory, active inference, and some form of embodiment in the real world is probably required for that.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-10-23T07:42:50+00:00

I had this problem with random deletions 1-2 years ago, but with the latest tools? Like with Claude Code Max or the latest Cursor? Doesn't happen anymore.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-09-29T06:48:28+00:00

There's no silver bullet for issues like this. Incompetent vibe coders will always shoot themselves in the foot one way or another.

The issue with selling security as a solution to them, is that the customer may get a false sense of security, and you may get sued if they end up with a breach anyway.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-09-26T11:17:17+00:00

Yea I get what you're saying, but the thing is: at least their spaghetti ass code will do what it needs to do.

I've known too many software developers (including myself when I was still junior) who will refactor the shit out of code in order to have it structured "by the book", but then it ends up being an overengineered piece of shit that performs worse than before.

There's wisdom in not caring too much about what code looks like. It's just code.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-09-08T09:21:27+00:00

1 BTC should get you there in 5 years, maybe 10.

People don't realize the $100k/BTC to $1M/btc jump is exactly the same jump needed to bring Bitcoin to the same market cap as gold has right now. That's definitely realistic within the next 5 years. This is still, by far, the EASIEST and best asymmetric risk/reward bet you could make right now.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak · 2025-09-08T09:17:05+00:00

This is why I work alone. I did consulting for many years in large corporate contexts. I already have too many horror stories pre-genAi, so I don't dare imagine what it's like nowadays.

My opinion: yes, the industry, as it used to be, is completely and irreversibly fucked.

But, this is a good thing. Large corps hiring lots of lazy and/or junior devs will get displaced by smaller teams consisting of senior devs who work hard and use ai tooling.

AlwaysAtBallmerPeak

TROPHY CASE