Ben Bartling

Code-first founder, no funding rounds, just software that earns its keep.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

Everyone yelling about the DB not in the same data center is technically correct, but completely wrong from a founder simplicity perspective. This is not the problem to solve today.

Also, I’ve seen this play out in the real world with read heavy apps with 100+ requests per second. One time we accidentally provisioned a DB in the wrong region, a neighboring region. We saw DB queries to that instance up ~250ms. No good.

When they are in the same region but not same data center we are seeing sub 20ms increases. Just not worth the squeeze in many cases. Id much rather have the DX of @PlanetScale or @neondatabase.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

In the age of agents, the whole company lives in the repo.

Marketing site. Docs. Changelog. Wiki. Decisions. All markdown. All in the same diff.

One agent can read, build, and compound across the whole thing.

https://t.co/A97K4OhOtO

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@Shpigford I noticed you are using Rails and Inertia in your skills. How are you liking this stack?

I have a large codebase that is Rails, Hotwire, ViewComponent. It has a minimal frontend right now, as it's mainly an API.

We are considering expanding the frontend, but the current stack doesn't feel well suited for our AI friends.

@inertiajs @rails @evilmartians

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@levie The companies that figure out how to productize pieces of this process will mint.

We need layers of abstraction and products to own pieces of it. It’s still way too much for most companies to implement, let alone maintain, with or without outside help.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@jonhainstock Also worth a look at Conductor or Superset. Nice flows for booting up worktrees with setup and isolated run scripts.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@jonhainstock What are you building?

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@toddsaunders Feeling the same lately

https://t.co/ZP6AKAU53X

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

I met with a mid-market manufacturing company yesterday. They make hinges and casters for automotive and industrial.

The CEO explained the RFQ process and it was clear the whole thing should be taken over by AI. Currently it’s 5 CSRs and a team of engineers manually responding to each request. They only win 15% of them this way, and each one can take a day to multiple weeks to respond to.

I’m urging them to just start building. It could be the single most impactful thing they do this year.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

I met with a mid-market manufacturing company yesterday. They make hinges and casters for automotive and industrial.

The CEO explained the RFQ process and it was clear the whole thing should be taken over by AI. Currently it’s 5 CSRs and a team of engineers manually responding to each request. They only win 15% of them this way, and each one can take a day to multiple weeks to respond to.

I’m urging them to just start building. It could be the single most impactful thing they do this year.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@Shpigford This looks cool. I just started using Obsidian for my personal knowledge base. I don't touch it, but Claude organizes it for me.

Why should I switch to Clearly from Obsidian?

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@toddsaunders Birds have no right to win here. I guess that doesn't matter.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

I wonder how much of this is capacity related (actual downtime in this case) vs. internal errors being raised somewhere down the stack (could also be capacity related, but not on the initial request). The internal errors aren't getting picked up by an uptime status monitoring tool.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@toddsaunders @ZacOHara T: How are you coming up with these ideas?
Z: It's the pain of the company.

This is what matters now.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

I have a similar fear. The smart companies and consultants will be targeted with what agents are worth deploying. 80/20 applies as always.

In time, more abstraction will come into play which will make it easier and cheaper to spin up agents. This will reduce the professional services tax for the mid-market. We saw this with SaaS vs. on-prem custom solutions.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@vishivishx @levie @Accenture Tell us more. How is it going? Are clients adopting solutions and seeing value? Or, is it mostly readiness studies and hypothetical still?

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

@yourchioma @levie Agree

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

This is a natural transition for all the engineers that are going to need/want to pivot out of traditional software development.

The consulting firms that are going to thrive here are not your existing management consultant types. The next gen technical shops that are truly AI first thinkers will shape this.

[Ben Bartling @benbartling]

AI has reshaped software forever, but devs are taking it in stride. We're wired for constant change. New tools, new paradigms, ship and adapt. Most of us are embracing it.

I worry about every other industry. The resistance will be stronger there, and the reckoning harder.