The bounded surface area insight is right, but the actual forcing function is context window size. Small codebase fits in context, LLM can reason end-to-end. You get the same containment with well-defined modules in a monolith if your tooling picks the right files to feed into the prompt.

Interesting corollary: as context windows keep growing (8k to 1M+ in two years), this architectural pressure should actually reverse. When a model can hold your whole monolith in working memory, you get all the blast radius containment without the operational overhead of separate services, billing accounts, and deployment pipelines.

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stingraycharles 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This makes no sense as you’re able to have similar interfaces and contracts using regular code.

Microservices solve an organizational problem mostly — teams being able to work completely independently, do releases independently, etc — but as soon you’re going to actually do that, you’re introducing a lot of complexity (but gain organizational scalability).

This has nothing to do with context sizes.

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lyricalstring 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agree on the context window framing. If an LLM needs well-defined boundaries to work well, just write clean module interfaces. You don't need a network boundary for that.

The part about "less scrutiny on PR review" and committing straight to main is telling too. That's not really about microservices, that's just wanting to ship faster with less oversight. Works until it doesn't.

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Kim_Bruning 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The part about "less scrutiny on PR review" and committing straight to main is telling too. That's not really about microservices, that's just wanting to ship faster with less oversight. Works until it doesn't.

And that's the reason I think the author proposes microservices I think. Doesn't need to be microservices, but something where your codebase is split up so that when-not-if it does blow up, you only roll back the one component and try again.

Modularization is hardly a new idea, but might need a slight spin to allow agents to work by themselves a bit more. The speed advantages are too tantalizing not to.

	▲	Kim_Bruning 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Expanding: Think of it this way: A typical sprint in current best practices is 1-2 weeks. Having to scrap a module and start over loses you a lot of time and money. A typical "AI sprint " is << 20 minutes. Several passes of failing a module and rewriting the spec is still only a few hours. A typical rant is "You claim only the output is what counts; but what about the human warmth?". Well, this is IT. If you can thoroughly prove that the inputs and outputs are identical to spec you have done the thing. Harder than it sounds: CDNs and suss libraries no one told you about, abysmal security, half baked features? Uh.... yeah that happens. But if the blast radius is small, it's fixable and survivable. Hopefully. Famous last words.

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dist-epoch 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Large context windows cost more money. So the pressure is still there to keep it tight.