Honestly, I am also at a faang working on a tier 0 distributed system in infra and the amount of AI generated code that is shipped on this service is probably like 40%+ at this point.
I'm not surprised at all here, last time I worked in a FAANG there was an enormous amount of boilerplate (e.g. Spring), and it almost makes me weep for lost time to think how easy some of that would be now.
It’s not just boilerplate. This is a low level C++ service where latency and performance is critical (don’t want to get into too much detail since I’ll dox myself). I used to think the same thing as you: “Surely my job is safe because this system is very complex”. I used to think this would just replace front end engineers who write boilerplate react code. 95% of our codebase is not boilerplate. AI has found optimizations in how we store items, AI has alerted us to production issues (with some degree of accuracy, of course). I worry that traditional software engineering as we know it will disappear and these hybrid AI jobs will be what’s left.
We support both at work (touchid and yubikey) and often I have my laptop in clamshell mode, so in that sense it’s easier to use the yubikey. Probably not the best reason, but works for me!
Because you can use that to interface with existing tooling. Terraform has a huge and established ecosystem and it’s an uphill battle to compete with it. It’s risky to bet your infra on a tech that tries to drink the ocean and supplant the entire thing. Meanwhile if you compile down to TF you get to use a different language without having to pay the cost of moving out of the tf ecosystem. And given that the language itself is by far the worst thing about terraform that’s a big win.
It turns out terraform is actually quite acceptable when you slap a decent language on top of it. Passable, even :)
We've been migrating off of Terraform at BigCo recently and it has been a tremendous success. The migration has saved countless hours. Before, I was jaded and routinely in the office until 8 or 9 or so manually running terraform deploys for our engineering teams in India. Now, thanks to Pulumi, I'm able to leave the office at 7:30-8 -- and I can tell you single handed that this has saved my relationship with my daughter and maybe even my marriage. I'm running the fastest for loops thanks to Pulumi. We actually compile our Python down to c and use the Pulumi C SDK for insane speed benefits when we loop over our datacenter arrays. Turns out, not having bounds checks shaves off valuable time that I would otherwise be spending with my daughter. Routinely I'd be waking up screaming at 4 in the morning due to Terraform (or, what we would refer to as Tearaform because all of the infra engineers were constantly in tears). Now, I can sleep soundly until 5:30.
Thanks for sharing your story it sounds like you had a really rough time of Terraform.
I don't have much experience running Terraform at scale. What has Pulumi made easier? Why is looping a bottleneck in infrastructure code?
Based on the info I can glean from this story you may be working at a scale / use case that may be too big or a poor fit for Terraform but I'm not sure...
Also, when I was the target of one of these "booters", a lot of them explicitly state they're only to be used for stress testing services you own, which is legal.
They absolutely didn't miss it -- it was definitely a conscious decision to prevent "pro" users from buying a cheaper MacBook Air and instead get them to purchase the more expensive 14/16" M2 MacBook Pro (whenever it comes out).
