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by rapind 293 days ago
Translation: The AWS interface is so horrendously complicated that we now need an AI to navigate it.

Also, as a daily AI user (claude code / codex subs), I'm not sure I want YOLO AIs anywhere near my infra.

3 comments

We use Azure and sometimes Hetzner. I don't think Azure is a bad product, but it sometimes amazes me just how many different ways they can let you buy something as simple as a "load balancer". Azure obviously has some services that Hetzner does not, a lot, but as far as 95% of what we need in our cloud infra Hetzner does just fine and it's soooooooo much simpler.

I don't mind letting AI's help with infra, but it's with the configs and infra as code files and it will never have any form of access to anything outside it's little box. It's significantly faster at writing out the port ranges for an FTP (don't ask) ingress than I can by hand.

> Translation: The AWS interface is so horrendously complicated that we now need an AI to navigate it.

that's because infrastructure is complicated. the AWS console isn't that bad (it's not great, and you should just use terraform whenever possible because clickops is dull, error-prone work); there's just a lot to know in order to deploy infrastructure cost-effectively.

this is more like "we don't want to hire infra engineers who know what they're doing so here's a tool to make suggestions that a knowledgeable engineer would make, vet and apply. just Trust Us."

> and you should just use terraform whenever possible

Or CloudFormation, cleaner, reusable, easy to read/write, less LOC than TF :)

AWS has created a whole economy of companies whose job is to make the dashboard more tolerable. Hopefully our agents help with that haha.