[HN Gopher] Vertical integration is the only thing that matters
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Vertical integration is the only thing that matters
Author : miguelraz
Score : 16 points
Date : 2025-11-11 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (becca.ooo)
| Zensynthium wrote:
| Very interesting article. As a developer that has focused on
| writing more code than the infrastructure and tooling, I can
| definitely see the benefit to a product existing that allows
| everything to work together more seamlessly because on the
| surface everything we need to do it already exists. Something
| like glue code we could drop in or like you mentioned the whole
| integrated environment. I didn't realize how specific and
| difficult it was to do something like this, maybe it's not that
| we should have deployable option, but that technology could get
| to a point to where maybe implementing and deploying this could
| be worth it as you could get more value than effort it takes to
| implement on a per company basis so companies besides Google and
| other big tech companies can operate like this.
| cestith wrote:
| I like the points made in the article. I hate this overloading of
| the term.
| jamesdutc wrote:
| I just could not disagree more.
|
| This kind of rigid, singular view of operational workflows based
| on precomposed automations not only constantly break but also
| inevitably introduce huge inefficiences.
|
| I posted a longer comment on lobste.rs:
| https://lobste.rs/s/azpsqe/vertical_integration_is_only_thin...
| pippy360 wrote:
| yes! couldn't agree more with your long post. Especially this
| part: "(This is exacerbated when components of the automation
| require internal-only tooling--the poor data scientist now
| needs to go read through a bunch of half-written, out-of-date
| documentation about tools they simply don't care about to do a
| task that is not a core responsibility for them.)"
|
| "Vertical integration" in my experience has just been turning a
| group of simple tools into a complex monolith that no one
| understands and is extremely difficult to debug
| vinceguidry wrote:
| This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent
| so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless
| only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for
| something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used
| Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked,
| everybody else just either worked around it or complained
| endlessly about it.
|
| I am now thoroughly convinced that software engineers, if there
| is currently no snake whispering in their ear to throw away the
| paradise garden they're been handed on high, will find a way to
| do it anyway. Coders will, to the last, prefer self-inflicted
| misery over the heaven they've been gifted for free.
|
| And if you don't believe me, let me tell you we already have a
| fully-vertically integrated tool stack, a whole family of them.
| It's called Smalltalk, it's been around since the 70s, and modern
| variants of course exist. You can build stuff in it today, and
| thoroughly enjoy your computing life as a result.
|
| The second you turn your head though, your fellow teammates will
| conspire to replatform onto Go or Rust or NodeJS or GitHub
| Actions and make everything miserable again.
|
| Don't buy the nonsense that vertical integration is hard. It's
| not. You just hire really sharp folks, get them excited about the
| idea, and they do all the hard integration work, then you release
| it to the community and let them build on it. Rails was like this
| back in the 2010s, there was this golden age where everything
| just worked. Then all of a sudden javascript took over the web
| world like cancer and the web stopped being fun.
|
| It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-
| integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that
| jostle it in the horizontal direction. And coders are too afraid
| of falling behind that they end up fetishizing any new idea that
| comes along, no matter how daft. Javascript on the _server_?!?!
| Your solution to js 's, let's call them problems, is gradual
| typing? That snake's never gonna run out of ears to whisper in,
| lemme tell ya.
|
| Integrated toolsets can, have, and are still being done. You can
| use them now. But you don't want it. Even if you do, nobody you
| work with will trust it or keep it after you leave. And so
| companies have no motive anymore to sell them to you. Microsoft
| themselves stopped trying after 2019.
| azeirah wrote:
| Luckily I work with laravel and that's a spiritual successor to
| rails.
|
| The development experience is almost always really smooth and
| there are more and more tools to further smoothen that
| experience every day.
|
| There are definitely better tools out there but given how the
| web ecosystem functions, it could be much worse.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| The Rails experience of 15 years ago is still achievable,
| with Rails, today. It's even better if you can believe it.
| You just have to throw out the notion of SPA frameworks and
| be willing to actually learn how HTML / CSS works. I read an
| article here a month ago about how nobody's willing to do
| that.
|
| The deficiency in web standards that SPA frameworks were
| invented to resolve have all been fixed, there's nothing they
| offer anymore that you can't do without them. But they hang
| over the neck of the web world like an albatross.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Meh, I think its just hubris to ignore your users (in this case
| the rest of the team) and tell yourself they're just dumb for
| not using your clearly perfect system.
|
| There is a slight amount of NIH you have to fight, but for the
| most part, if a process is truly seamless, that NIH will get
| pushed to a different part of the stack that's more front of
| mind.
|
| The real issue is that you're trivializing needs that live
| outside your purview and because of that you can't fathom why a
| js dev who wants a server to do something would want js on the
| server.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| You can at least get (3) for low/no cost with pre-commit hooks
| running locally and in CI.
| maccard wrote:
| The problem with hooks is they're not enforced (in git) so you
| need to run them in CI.
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