[HN Gopher] Claude Code for Infrastructure
___________________________________________________________________
Claude Code for Infrastructure
Author : aspectrr
Score : 263 points
Date : 2026-02-04 18:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fluid.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fluid.sh)
| aspectrr wrote:
| Hey HN, My name is Collin and I'm working on fluid.sh
| (https://fluid.sh) the Claude Code for Infrastructure.
|
| What does that mean?
|
| Fluid is a terminal agent that do work on production
| infrastructure like VMs/K8s cluster/etc. by making sandbox clones
| of the infrastructure for AI agents to work on, allowing the
| agents to run commands, test connections, edit files, and then
| generate Infra-as-code like an Ansible Playbook to be applied on
| production.
|
| Why not just use an LLM to generate IaC?
|
| LLMs are great at generating Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, etc.
| but bad at guessing how production systems work. By giving access
| to a clone of the infrastructure, agents can explore, run
| commands, test things before writing the IaC, giving them better
| context and a place to test ideas and changes before deploying.
|
| I got the idea after seeing how much Claude Code has helped me
| work on code, I thought "I wish there was something like that for
| infrastructure", and here we are.
|
| Why not just provide tools, skills, MCP server to Claude Code?
|
| Mainly safety. I didn't want CC to SSH into a prod machine from
| where it is running locally (real problem!). I wanted to lock
| down the tools it can run to be only on sandboxes while also
| giving it autonomy to create sandboxes and not have access to
| anything else.
|
| Fluid gives access to a live output of commands run (it's pretty
| cool) and does this by ephemeral SSH Certificates. Fluid gives
| tools for creating IaC and requires human approval for creating
| sandboxes on hosts with low memory/CPU and for accessing the
| internet or installing packages.
|
| I greatly appreciate any feedback or thoughts you have, and I
| hope you get the chance to try out Fluid!
| redrove wrote:
| So how is this different from deploying claude code on a VM and
| letting it run? You can sandbox it in any of the dozen ways
| already available.
|
| What's the differentiator?
| jondwillis wrote:
| One allows middleman rent-seeking and the other does not so
| much.
| aspectrr wrote:
| This allows the agent to make any changes in a production
| clone vs agents running on a production VM. For example, you
| wouldn't want claude editing crucial config on the chance it
| brings everything down vs letting it do in a cloned
| environment where it can test whatever.
| amanzi wrote:
| Why would you not put a description like this on your actual
| website? Your homepage does not explain anything about what
| this actually does. Are you really expecting infrastructure
| engineers to install your app with a bash command after only
| providing the following information? Claude
| Code for infrastructure. Debug, act, and audit everything Fluid
| does on your infrastructure. Create sandboxes from
| VMs, investigate, plan, execute, generate Ansible playbooks,
| and audit everything.
| aspectrr wrote:
| True. Tried to make it simpler but clearly not a good enough
| job!
| verdverm wrote:
| It reads like a blog post, not a landing page
| nkko wrote:
| This is exciting. But I had to read and check everything twice
| to figure it out, as some already commented. Strong Feedback
| loop is an ultimate unlock for AI agents and having twins is
| exactly the right approach.
| aspectrr wrote:
| YOOO thanks niko! Currently reworking lots of wording to make
| it easier to understand!
| tayo42 wrote:
| > I didn't want CC to SSH into a prod machine from where it is
| running locally (real problem!). I wanted to lock down the
| tools it can run to be only on sandboxes while also giving it
| autonomy to create sandboxes and not have access to anything
| else.
|
| This is already the modern way to run infra. If your running
| simple apps, why are you even spinning up vms? Container
| running platforms make this so easy.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| And how is this different than just pointing Terraformer at
| your existing infrastructure and rebuilding it in another
| account? That is assuming your company is standing complicated
| infra up by hand and if they are, your entire "DevOps" team or
| who ever is responsible needs to be fired
| verdverm wrote:
| > By giving access to a clone of the infrastructure, agents can
| explore, run commands, test things before writing the IaC,
| giving them better context and a place to test ideas and
| changes before deploying.
|
| And you thought the costs for burning tokens was high... let's
| amp it up by spinning up a bunch of cloud infra and let the
| agents fumble about.
|
| DevOps is my gig, I use agents extensively, I would never do
| this. This is so wasteful
| js2 wrote:
| You might want to remove that `.DS_Store` from the root of the
| repo and add `.DS_Store` to your global git ignore.
| JimDabell wrote:
| An agent that runs things in remote sandboxes to set things up
| doesn't really fit with Infrastructure as Code.
|
| Lately I have been setting up Pulumi stacks in ephemeral AWS
| accounts managed by AWS Organizations and working on a
| Kubernetes cluster locally with Tilt. So far, Claude is pretty
| good with those things. It seems to have pretty good knowledge
| of Pulumi, basic knowledge of Tilt, and good knowledge of
| Kubernetes. It's a little out of date on some things and needs
| reminding to RTFM, but it can get a lot done by itself. If it
| were a real point of friction, a cheat sheet (sorry, "skill")
| would be enough to solve the majority of issues.
|
| The example you provide seems to be more along the lines of
| SSHing into remote boxes and setting things up manually. That's
| not really helpful when you want to work on repeatable infra.
| You try to distinguish yourself from generating Terraform etc.,
| but actually that's what's valuable in my experience.
| lijok wrote:
| FUCK NO. Who in their right mind would let an LLM connect to
| prod?
| locusofself wrote:
| Maybe at a greenfield startup. Where I work this idea wouldn't
| be entertained for a millisecond.
| jhickok wrote:
| why does it have to connect to prod in order to be useful?
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Many places have "dev", "test" "prod"... but IMHO you need
| "sandpit" as well.
|
| From an ops point of view as orgs get big enough, dev wraps
| around to being prod-like... in the sense that it has the
| property that there's going to be a lot of annoyed people whose
| time you're wasting if you break things.
|
| You can take the approach of having more guard rails and
| controls to stop people breaking things but personally I prefer
| the "sandpit" approach, where you have accounts / environments
| where anything goes. Like, if anyone is allowed to complain
| it's broken, it's not sandpit anymore. That makes them an ok
| place to let agents loose for "whole system" work.
|
| I see tools like this as a sort of alternative / workaround.
| thenewnewguy wrote:
| Sandpit should be a personal (often local, if possible) dev
| environment. The reason people get mad about dev being broken
| for long periods of time is that they cannot use dev to test
| their changes if your code (that they depend on) is broken in
| dev for long periods of time.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Agreed on all points. Local loops are faster and safer
| wherever possible.
|
| But particularly for devops / systems focused work, you
| lose too much "test fidelity" if you're not integrating
| against real services / cloud.
| lijok wrote:
| There's no sandpit, only prod and dev, and you're not allowed
| to break prod. Your developers work in partitions of prod.
| Dev is used for DR and other infra testing.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Well that's just - dumb
| lijok wrote:
| Wanna elaborate?
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Account vending machines where every dev can spin up thier
| own account is a thing and still under the control of some
| type of guardrails.
| qudat wrote:
| I think you would be very surprised at a) how useful it would
| be and b) how lax prod can be depending on the company culture
| and stakes.
| aspectrr wrote:
| Hey, I get it. I don't want LLMs on prod at all. I made this to
| let agents connect to production cloned sandboxes, not
| production itself. I hope this helps your concerns, but I
| understand either way. Lmk with any other questions.
| lijok wrote:
| What's a production cloned sandbox? Take my comment as
| feedback that the landing page is anaemic
| aspectrr wrote:
| For example, if you had an on-prem footprint with thousands
| of VMs, a production cloned sandbox would be a clone of a
| VM to let AI safely make changes, install packages, etc.
|
| Yeah, working on the landing page. Feel free to ask any
| other questions!
| lfx wrote:
| Hey Collin!
|
| Interesting idea, few things:
|
| - The website tells less than your comment here. I want to try
| but have no idea how destructive it can be.
|
| - You need to add / mention how to do things in the RO mode only.
|
| - Always explain destructive actions.
|
| Few weeks ago I had to debug K8S on the GCP GDC metal, Claude
| Code helped me tons, but... I had to recreate whole cluster next
| day because agent ran too fast deleted things it should not
| delete or at least tell me the full impact. So some harness would
| be nice.
| flowardnut wrote:
| agreed, the repo readme is far more informative than the
| website
| aspectrr wrote:
| Hey! Yes I updated the website with some more of my comments. -
| RO mode would be a good idea - Agreed on explaining destructive
| actions. The only (possibly) destructive action is creating the
| sanbox on the host, but that asks the user's permission if the
| host doesn't have enough resources. Right now it supports VMs
| with KVM. It will not let you create a sandbox if the host
| doesn't have enough ram or cpus.
|
| - The kubernetes example is exactly what this is built for,
| giving AI access is dangerous but there is always a chance of
| it messing something. Thanks for the comment!
| falloutx wrote:
| All these tools to build something, but nothing to build. I feel
| like I am part of a Pyramid Scheme where every product is about
| building something else, but nothing reaches the end user.
|
| Note: nothing against fluid.sh, I am struggling to figure out
| something to build.
| aabajian wrote:
| That is the problem with software developers with expertise in
| software, but no deep domain knowledge outside the CS world.
| tempest_ wrote:
| It is my belief with some exceptions it is almost always
| easier to teach a domain expert to code than it is to teach a
| software developer the domain.
| bluGill wrote:
| For problems that can be solved with only a small amount of
| simple code that is true. However software can become very
| complex and the larger/more complex the problem is the more
| important software developers are. It quickly becomes
| easier to teach software developers enough of your domain
| than to teach domain experts software.
|
| In a complex project the hard parts about software are
| harder than the hard parts about the domain.
|
| I've seen the type of code electrical engineers write (at
| least as hard a domain as software). They can write code,
| but it isn't good.
| scottyah wrote:
| That's true both ways though: if a theoretical physicist
| wants to display a model for a new theorem, it'd be
| probably easier for them to learn some python or js than
| for a software engineer to understand the theorems.
| thwarted wrote:
| If this is the case is discoverable, for at least one
| direction. Reproducability is known to be a problem in
| some of the sciences, for various reasons. Find a paper
| that includes its data and software/methodology used for
| analysis, and try to get it running and producing the
| same results. Evaluate the included software/methodology
| on whatever software quality standards you feel are
| necessary or appropriate.
| grvdrm wrote:
| Hard disagree with hard parts of software are harder than
| domain. I don't know your story, skills, or domain. But
| this doesn't match my experience and others around me at
| all.
| tecoholic wrote:
| Maybe you and others around you are all in some form of
| engineering capacity? Because I have seen software
| everywhere from coffee shops, bicycle repairs, to K12
| education - all of whom would hard disagree with you.
| Lutger wrote:
| Really depends on the domain. I've been in jobs where the
| domain was much harder than my job as a software
| engineer, but I've also been in jobs where I quickly got
| to understand the domain better than the domain experts,
| or at least parts of it. I believe this is not because
| I'm smart (I'm not), but because software engineering
| requires precise requirements, which requires unrelenting
| questioning and attention to details.
|
| The ability to acquire domain knowledge quickly however,
| isn't exactly the same as the ability to develop complex
| software.
| paodealho wrote:
| It is my experience that most of these business domain
| experts snore the moment you talk about anything related to
| the difficulties of creating software.
| vntok wrote:
| Until a few months ago, domain experts who ciuldn't code
| would "make do" with some sort of Microsoft Excel
| Spreadsheet From Hell (MESFH), an unholy beast that would
| usually start small and then always grow up to become a
| shadow ERP (at best) or even the actual ERP (at worst).
|
| The best part, of course, is that this mostly works, most
| of the time, for most busineses.
|
| Now, the same domain experts -who still cannot code- will
| do the exact same thing, but AI will make the
| _spreadsheet_ more stable (actual data modelling), more
| resilient (backup infra), more powerful (connect from /to
| anything), more ergonomic (actual views/UI), and
| generally more easy to iterate upon (constructive yet
| adversarial approach to conflicting change requests).
| bopbopbop7 wrote:
| > AI will make the spreadsheet more stable
|
| Hallucinations sure make spreadsheets nice and stable.
| xeromal wrote:
| We have monthly presentations at my job and the business
| folk are really leaning into AI. The biggest win so far
| are them being able to generate new user experiences and
| get them into figma by themselves. They're able to test a
| design, get it into figma, generate some code, and get it
| in front of users without a developer or designer at all.
| It's not perfect but the tests show what we need to focus
| on vs what falls flat when put in front of users. It's
| very impressive and I'm proud of them.
| rafterydj wrote:
| Super interesting. I don't know why, but something about
| this comment made something click for me, as an "AI
| fatigued" engineer.
|
| From the view you describe, it seems AI just lets you
| experiment faster, when all you want to do is experiment.
| You find product market fit easier, you empower designers
| more, etc. Much easier to iterate and find easy wins from
| alternative designs - as long as your fundamentals work!
|
| Only problem is that you are experimenting in public, so
| the massive wave of new AI generated features come to the
| public from everywhere at once. Hence the widespread
| backlash.
|
| Not to mention, the core job function when you are
| experimenting is different from what defines a lot of
| hard technical progress: creating new technologies, or
| foundational work that others build on, is naturally
| harder and slower than building e.g. CRUD services on top
| of an existing stack. Deep domain expertise matters for
| selling, deep programming expertise matters for
| stability. I don't know, curious where the line will end
| up getting drawn.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, the examples I've seen really focus on
| experimentation which my employers's platform is designed
| around. We are constantly testing changes in design and
| copy and hoping that we get small incremental increases
| in user attention. AI is really suited for these small
| changes and it allows us developers to build platforms
| specific stuff instead of working on baby tweaks. We
| already had a pretty good system where astute business
| people could tweak HTML and CSS but now their lives are
| even easier and they can focus on their actual job which
| is increasing customer sign ups and attention
| HolyLampshade wrote:
| Yeah, I think the issue has more to do with the curiosity
| level of the participant rather than whether they are a
| business domain expert or a software engineering expert.
|
| There's a requisite curiosity necessary to cross the
| discomfort boundary into how the sausage is made.
| imiric wrote:
| That doesn't track at all IME.
|
| Programming is not something you can teach to people who
| are not interested in it in the first place. This is why
| campaigns like "Learn to code" are doomed to fail.
|
| Whereas (good) programmers strive to understand the domain
| of whatever problem they're solving. They're comfortable
| with the unknown, and know how to ask the right questions
| and gather requirements. They might not become domain
| _experts_ , but can certainly learn enough to write
| software within that domain.
|
| Generative "AI" tools can now certainly help domain experts
| turn their requirements into software without learning how
| to program, but the tech is not there yet to make them
| entirely self-sufficient.
|
| So we'll continue to need both roles collaborating as they
| always have for quite a while still.
| peteridah wrote:
| Conversely, good developers can now leverage LLM's to
| master any domain.
| imiric wrote:
| Hhmm I think that's more difficult than using these tools
| for creating software. If generated software doesn't
| compile, or does the wrong thing, you know there's an
| issue. Whereas if the LLM gives you seemingly accurate
| information that is actually wrong, you have no way of
| verifying it, other than with a human domain expert. The
| tech is not reliable enough for either task yet, but
| software is easy to verify, whereas general information
| is not.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Every single time I try to get a domain expert at $job to
| let me learn more about the domain it goes goes nowhere.
|
| My belief is that engineers should be the prime candidates
| to be learning the domain, because it can positively
| influence product development. There's too many layers
| between engineers and the the domain IME
| thephyber wrote:
| I mostly agree, but I see programmers more as "language
| interpreters". They can speak the computer's language
| fluently and know enough about the domain to be able to
| explain it in some abstractions.
|
| The beauty of LLMs is that they can quickly gather and
| distill the knowledge on both sides of that relationship.
| isubkhankulov wrote:
| In practice, does that happen? Usually companies try to
| bring the best of both and build from there.
| thephyber wrote:
| I wouldn't argue how things historically worked, but
| rather where the LLM innovations suggest the trajectory
| will go.
| thephyber wrote:
| Not all kinds of programming are the same.
|
| Web dev is low entry barrier and most web devs don't need a
| very deep knowledge base.
|
| Embedded, low level language, using optimizations of the OS
| / hardware require MUCH more specialized knowledge. Most of
| the 4 year undergraduate program for Computer Science self
| selects for mathematics inclined students who then learn
| how to read and learn advanced mathematics / programming
| concepts.
|
| There's nothing that is a hard limit to prevent domain
| expert autodidacts from picking up programming, but the
| deeper the programming knowledge, the more the distribution
| curves of programmers / non-programmers will be able to
| succeed.
|
| Non programmers are more likely to be flexible to find less
| programming-specific methods to solve the overall problem,
| which I very much welcome. But I think LLM-based app
| development mostly just democratizes the entry into
| programming.
| rprend wrote:
| This is interesting. Do you know of any examples of
| successful tech companies built by non-technical founders?
| seemaze wrote:
| I think a more appropriate question would be:
|
| "Are there more or less examples of successful companies
| in a given domain that leverage software to increase
| productivity than software companies which find success
| in said domain?"
| xeromal wrote:
| Your question kind of answers itself with the filter of
| "tech companies". If you asked broadly about successful
| companies, the answer would be more apparent.
|
| But an answer to your question would be Capital One.
| ramblerman wrote:
| Eh, this is the kind of pithy soundbite that sounds vaguely
| deep and intelligent but doesn't hold up.
|
| In what domains have you had experience taking non
| programmers with domain knowledge and making them
| programmers?
| brightball wrote:
| One of my favorite things about this field is getting to
| learn about all of these different business domains.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Pretty much. I'm working on a few things with several people
| and I'm now constrained by their ability to find stuff to
| build.
| ge96 wrote:
| I want to make a business, but what is the business
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It's way easier to raise for dev tools than domain tools
| right now.
| ebiester wrote:
| Or... the places they have deep expertise they have NDA/non-
| competes to worry about. (At least, outside of California.)
|
| Sure, I could go and create an accounting app - or a clinical
| trial recruitment app - as a basic clone of what I've already
| created. And I might even make it better for some niche. But
| even if I know what that product system needs, I still need
| to find someone with the relationships to get in the door.
|
| The trick is - you don't need an idea man for a non-technical
| founder. You really need someone with a rolodex and a
| problem.
| mindwok wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I've been using Claude Code to build lots
| of customer facing things.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| I've been a year deep into my first job out of tech. There is a
| never ending slew of problems where being able to code,
| specially now with AI, means you have wizard-like powers to
| help your coworkers.
|
| My codebase is full of one-offs that slowly but surely converge
| towards cohesive/well-defined/reusable capabilities based on
| 'real' needs.
|
| I'm now starting to pitch consulting to a niche to see what
| sticks. If the dynamic from the office holds (as I help them,
| capabilities compound) then I'll eventually find something to
| call 'a product'.
| neochief wrote:
| Can I ask what do you do now?
| torginus wrote:
| That made me remember that one time many years ago, when I
| had a friend who literally called me a wizard.. He was
| working as a shift manager at a call center, and one of his
| most difficult tasks he kept ranting about was scheduling
| employees, who were not the most consistent bunch, and had
| varied skillset, yet he had to meet very strict support
| availability requirements.
|
| He kept ranting about what a b*tch of a problem that was,
| every time we went out drinking, and one day, something got
| into me, and thought there must be some software that can
| help with this.
|
| Surely there was, and I set up a server with an online web UI
| where every employee could put in when they were able to
| work, and the software figured out how to assign timeslots to
| cover requirements.
|
| I thought it was a nice exercise for me in learning to
| admininster a linux server, but when I showed it to my
| friend, he looked me in the eye and told me I a saved him a
| day of work every week, and called me a wizard :D
|
| It occured to me, how naturally part of the programming
| profession is to make things in fixed amounts of time, that
| turn difficult and time consuming tasks a human needed to do
| into something that essentially just happens on its own.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| The problem we have as software engineers (from an
| entrepreneur's pov) is that we mostly struggle with stuff
| that's removed from the client's problem.
|
| I mean it in terms of owning the solution to a problem,
| being accountable/responsible for something working e2e not
| just the software or even the product - the
| service/experience of the customer that makes them want to
| give you money. Once you put on another hat - guess what -
| you'd probably be the star of some operations team or a
| great supervisor of some department. You would automate
| everything around you to a point others think you're the
| most capable person they've ever seen in that role.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I'm really enjoying these LLMs for making ad-hoc tooling / apps
| for myself. Things that I only need for a day or a week, that
| don't need to work perfectly (I can work around bugs).
|
| It's really liberating. Instead of saying "gosh I wish there
| was an app that..." I just make the app and use it and move on.
| mierz00 wrote:
| Talk to people.
|
| There are an infinite amount of problems to solve.
|
| Deciding whether they're worth solving is the hard part.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Are any of these people willing to fund an answer to these
| problems?
| closewith wrote:
| There are companies making a lot of money directly from
| software largely written by LLMs especially since Claude Code
| was released, but they aren't mentioning LLMs or AI in any
| marketing, client communications, or public releases. I'm at
| least very aware that we need to be able to retire before LLMs
| swamp or obsolete our niche, and don't want to invite
| competition.
|
| Outside of tech companies, I think this is extremely common.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Someone on HN pointed out how all the LLM companies are
| basically going "we made this thing, can y'all please find the
| billion dollar application for it?" and that really made a lot
| of things - namely why I'm frequently raising an eyebrow at
| these tools and the vague promises/demand that we use them -
| click into place.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I have found uses for various AI tools. But
| nothing consistent and daily yet, aside from AI audio repair
| tools and that's not really the same thing.
| aspectrr wrote:
| Sell the shovels!!
| ge96 wrote:
| Side note, been watching gold prospecting channels lately,
| there will be these dig sites/claims people go to, they'll do
| their thing, dig a hole, run it through some angled ramp
| water contraption... they get like nothing, it's the
| experience I suppose. But I was wondering what the owner gets
| from all these people showing up.
|
| They'll work for hours and end up with $4 of gold
| greymalik wrote:
| When there's a gold rush, sell shovels.
| jayd16 wrote:
| The point is that there's no gold. It's just a shovel rush.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I find myself building fun tools for myself and things that
| help with quality of life _slightly_ , but I don't need all
| this extra enterprise stuff for that. I actually find myself
| more likely to use something I built because I am proud of it,
| even if there is already something on the market that addresses
| my need.
| zurtri wrote:
| Another option is to bring your coding skills to a industry not
| particularly known for using tech.
| imiric wrote:
| This type of software is mainly created to gain brand
| recognition, influence, or valuation, not to solve problems for
| humans. Its value is indirect and speculative.
|
| These are the pets.com of the current bubble, and we'll be
| flooded by them before the damn thing finally pops.
| headcanon wrote:
| Maybe have it build some toy apps just for fun! My wife and I
| were talking once about typing speed and challenged each other
| to a typing competition. the existing ones I found weren't very
| good and were riddled with ads, so I had Claude build one for
| us to use.
|
| Or maybe ask yourself what do you like to do outside of work?
| maybe build an app or claude skill to help with that.
|
| If you like to cook, maybe try building a recipe manager for
| yourself. I set up a repo to store all of my recipes in
| cooklang (similar to markdown), and set up claude skills to
| find/create/evaluate new recipes.
|
| Building the toy apps might help you come up with ideas for
| larger things too.
| dubeye wrote:
| building is the easy bit, more than ever.
|
| selling it is the hard part, nothing new there
| cortesoft wrote:
| One of my first professional coding jobs was in 2007 when
| Facebook first introduced 'Facebook Apps'. I worked for a
| startup making a facebook app, and EVERY SINGLE app company had
| the same monetization strategy: Selling ads for other facebook
| apps.
|
| So the lifecycle of an app would be:
|
| 1) Create your game/quiz/whatever app.
|
| 2) Pay a successful app $x per install, and get a bunch of app
| installs.
|
| 3) Put all sorts of scammy "get extra in game perks if you
| refer your friends" to try to become viral.
|
| 4) Hope to become big enough that people start finding you
| without having to pay for ads.
|
| 5) Sell ads to other facebook app startups to generate installs
| for them.
|
| It was a completely circular economy. There was not product or
| income source other than the next layer of the pyramid.
|
| It didn't last long.
| pxc wrote:
| Aren't most ads in scummy mobile games ads for other scummy
| mobile games, to this very day?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yes, but those apps also have scummy microtransactions, so
| at least there is SOME outside revenue entering the system.
| JMiao wrote:
| Hate to break it to you, but it's still going on, just
| outside the fb app api.
| verdverm wrote:
| The recent YC -> Circle -> Coinbase -> YC comes to mind
| catrulo wrote:
| What is this?
| verdverm wrote:
| YC invested in Coinbase, which invested in Circle, which
| is now investing in YC companies
|
| full circle, not full stop
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| What a beautiful microcosm of the attention economy.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Yes I remember those days! I joined a startup whose first
| product was a Facebook app in 2007. We were right around the
| corner from Facebook HQ on Forest and High, and we were alpha
| partners for the launch of Pages. We created a feature film
| streaming app (the learning was: no one watches 100-minute
| videos on Facebook). While we never intended to be a
| Facebook-app company, technically it was the first thing we
| launched.
|
| Fast forward 18 years, and the company is going strong with
| millions of subscribers and distributing Oscar winning films
| such as Demi Moore's The Substance.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The Auteurs?
| lp4v4n wrote:
| To be quite honest, in many ways AI itself feels a bit
| "scammy" sometimes. The biggest case for it seems to be how
| to shit one million garbage apps by snapping your fingers,
| while problems that are really hard to solve go unaffected.
| xeromal wrote:
| That sounds pretty fishy, but in my head, that's what an
| economy is. There aren't a lot of new inputs into the system.
| It's just a circulatory system of value moving around. The
| only new inputs would be things like mines, oil wells, and
| other outside forces. Labor is too I guess but I think it's
| less raw.
| baby wrote:
| I'm on the other hand, I have a million ideas and AI has
| allowed me to implement so many of them.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Ask an LLM for suggestions on what to build
| Aperocky wrote:
| Nailed it!
|
| This is not even AI - it's pre-AI, and everyone has continued
| to try to create things that other people can use as a
| dependency, just on a much higher pace.
|
| I've found writing simulations that my childhood brain would
| have LOVED to see run fun and fulfilling.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| build us a way out
| whattheheckheck wrote:
| If infirmation arbitrage is the game then it's now a race to
| distribution channels and trust.
|
| Also what does society need? Smart workers and people who
| believe in the system... so where does that leave us? We need
| to make something that would better enable children to want to
| grow up in the world and participate. Otherwise were doing
| nothing of value and in a death spiral
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Steve Jobs used to say every product needs a killer feature
|
| AI is a product in search of a killer feature
|
| First AGI was anyday going to come. Gpt5 had showed
| intelligence apparently
|
| Then got started adult chat with paying customers
| geodel wrote:
| Isn't AGI Adult Group Interaction?
| thewhitetulip wrote:
| Yes, I didn't think ofthat. See he is right. They did
| achieve AGI, just not the one he wanted
| abhisek wrote:
| Everybody wants to build infra. Automate something which is
| known and well understood. Hoping someone else will use it to
| solve end user's problem which is hard to understand, messy and
| often highly contextual.
|
| To summarize: Everyone wants to automate stuff. Most people do
| not want to touch boring, large problems.
| sschueller wrote:
| I am in the same boat but I recently found I could also use
| these tool so reverse engineer stuff as well. For example I
| purchased this label printer from china and was unsatisfied
| with the printing quality under Linux. So I "coded" a go script
| to print via BLE instead of CUPS [1]. To do this I de-compiled
| the android app that comes with the printer and instead of
| spending hours going through it I just told an Agentic AI to do
| this for me.
|
| I am now so deep into the rabbit hole that I have made a
| version that runs entirely in the browser and an ESP32 version.
| I have now also taken the printer apart to find that the built
| in BLE is an external module and I could interface directly
| with the printer by replacing it with my own custom PCB...
|
| [1] https://sschueller.github.io/posts/making-a-label-printer-
| wo...
| berkanunal wrote:
| Shovel market
|
| https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/6...
| akst wrote:
| In macroeconomic, you have an aggregate production functions
| that represents output for a country or something. In many of
| these function you'll have a parameter for technology, it acts
| as a multiplier over inputs, so the greater the measure of
| technology the greater the output. Quite a few of these also
| exhibt a characteristic where output drops if technology
| increases too fast. To illustrate this, imagine a scenario in
| real life that kind of looks like a rapid evolution of some
| kind of technology of home phones, to cell phones, to smart
| phones at a rate faster than people know how to make use of
| them, while also spending money adoption making the
| intermediary adoptions quite wasteful.
|
| I think we see an aspect of this here, a lot of things we took
| for granted are changing, shared assumptions are being
| challenged and it's a period we're all relearning new things.
| To some extent spending too much time diving on the current
| iteration of AI tooling might be for nothing if gets
| invalidated by another sudden jump.
|
| With all these new tools people are building, I can't help but
| feel they are building foundations on moving soil.
| pydry wrote:
| With the industrial revolution extra demand for industrial
| overcapacity was created in the form of war.
|
| After the war the US created extra demand in the form of
| consumerism.
|
| China is creating extra demand for infrastructure
| overcapacity with its belt and road initiative.
|
| I wouldnt underestimate the abililty of the country to
| creatively create demand to counter oversupply.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I feel the same, it's like there's more offer than demand
| somehow
| baalimago wrote:
| It's pretty cool. What would be cooler is to have it as a MCP
| server... and then use claude code
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Clever solution. I think ops (like this) and observability will
| be pretty hot markets for a while soon. The code is quite cheap
| now, but actually running it and keeping it running still
| requires some amount of background. I've had a number of
| acquaintances ask me how they can get their vibe coded app
| available for others to use.
|
| I really like this idea. I do a lot of kubernetes ops with
| workloads I'm unfamiliar with (and not directly responsible for)
| and often give claude read access in order to help me debug
| things, including with things like a grafana skill in order to
| access the same monitoring tools humans have. It's saved me
| dozens of hours in the last months - and my job is significantly
| less frustrating now.
|
| Your method of creating ansible playbooks makes _tons_ of sense
| for this kind of work. I typically create documentation (with
| claude) for things after I've worked through them (with claude)
| but playbooks is a very, very clever move.
|
| I would say something similar but as an auditable, controllable
| kubernetes operator would be pretty welcome.
| aspectrr wrote:
| Thanks! Kubernetes is the next infrastructure primitive that I
| want to support but I'm glad you like. If you have any
| questions or ideas, lmk!
| boondongle wrote:
| The real problem is just the volatility for the employees.
| Unless Board of Directors/Owners punish downtime, you risk a
| dark pattern of uptime just being a nice-to-have when I can
| just replace any expertise with the next kid out of college +
| Claude.
|
| So you really need customers to react. And this isn't
| theoretical - people have already lost their jobs and there's
| really, really good people in the market available right now.
| tobi_bsf wrote:
| Whats wrong with just using claude code for infrastructure? Works
| great tbh.
| aspectrr wrote:
| I wish, for my work it would be a safety nightmare. I left a
| comment on this topic.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46889704&goto=item%3Fi...
| ekaesmem wrote:
| Please at least write the README.md by yourself. It's excessively
| lengthy.
| levkk wrote:
| So... I already tell Claude Code to do this. Just run kubectl for
| me please and figure out why my helm chart is broken.
|
| Scary? A little but it's doing great. Not entirely sure why a
| specialized tool is needed when the general purpose CLI is
| working.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Yeah. The times I have let claude off the read-only leash, it's
| gone fine for me too (with stern warnings not to do anything
| stupid, and a close eye). But that's not really solving the
| same problem as this project, I guess. From what I can see this
| is using a safer and more reproducible method (and not k8s
| native, so it feels a little foreign to me).
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| In Zed I just have it auto approve everything, macOS will
| scream if "Zed" tries to escape the folder its in anyway.
| peterldowns wrote:
| Opus 4.5 is pretty good about following instructions to not
| do anything destructive, but Gemini 3 Flash actively
| disregards my advice and just starts running commands.
| Definitely recommend setting up default-readonly access for
| stuff like this and requiring some kind of out-of-band
| escalation process for when you need to do writes/destroys.
| hivacruz wrote:
| I do the same. I was thinking about creating read-only
| kubeconfigs for him to make sure it can't do bad stuff but with
| a good SKILL.md, it works perfectly.
| levkk wrote:
| Him! That settles the Turing test debate.
| irl_zebra wrote:
| I've noticed a lot of LLM-based tools that are essentially this
| sort of thing. Just a slightly more specific prompt wrapper
| around the core capability that can already do the thing. It's
| so bad.
| uoaei wrote:
| That has been the case this entire time. The "ChatGPT-
| wrapper" startups were little more than a webapp frontend for
| ChatGPT with a clever prompt.
| aspectrr wrote:
| Lol, that does sounds a little scary but if it works it works.
| Mainly I built this to prevent there being a chance that
| changes affect production. This is meant to be used with scale
| (say hundreds of VMs) vs 1. From a safety perspective running
| Claude Code with just a watchful eye would not fly in my
| environment, which is why I built something like this.
| levkk wrote:
| More power to you! Good luck!
| bakies wrote:
| I let it read-only and gitops driven and find it's really good
| and feels pretty safe to get it to PR fixes. Run it with no
| permission checks
| messh wrote:
| Yeah, I'm telling it to use aws cli to spin up instances,
| configure them, start servers, read cw logs etc.
| peterldowns wrote:
| I do this but make sure to only have readonly/nondestructive
| access. It's extremely cool how well it works.
| richstokes wrote:
| Same. I've had good results with read only accounts / tokens
| and let the agent have at it. Also works with terraform, aws
| cli, etc.
|
| One does not need a new/separate tool to do any of this, just
| include it in your agents instructions.
| esafak wrote:
| An infrastructure tool's primary installation method should NOT
| be curl | sh
| charcircuit wrote:
| It should be. This is the least friction way to do so as server
| Linux operating systems still have not agreed on a common
| application format / package manager.
| esafak wrote:
| > It should be. This is the least friction way to do so as
| server Linux operating systems still have not agreed on a
| common application format / package manager.
|
| Nowhere in your response did you mention security.
| verdverm wrote:
| or reproducibility
| charcircuit wrote:
| Unfortunately there is not a standardized way to securely
| install something.
| wlonkly wrote:
| And after all that, the shell script only does
|
| go install github.com/aspectrr/fluid.sh/fluid/cmd/fluid@latest
|
| !
| qainsights wrote:
| Can't we just use Claude Code straight up?
| alexandercheema wrote:
| Isn't Claude Code for Infrastructure just...Claude Code?
| aspectrr wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the comment. I answer this question in more
| depth on the website https://fluid.sh or this comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46889704&goto=item%3Fi...
|
| This lets AI work on cloned production sandboxes vs running on
| production instances. Yes you can sandbox Claude Code on a
| production box, but it cannot test changes like it would for
| production-breaking changes. Sandboxes give AI this flexibility
| allowing it to safely test changes and reproduce things via IaC
| like Ansible playbooks.
| stackskipton wrote:
| Ops person here.
|
| I'm already using LLM to generate things and I'm not sure what
| this adds. The Demo isn't really doing it for me but maybe I'm
| wrong target for it. (What is running on that server? You don't
| know. Build your cattle properly!)
|
| Maybe this is better for one man band devs trying to get
| something running without caring beyond, it's running.
| aspectrr wrote:
| Hey no problem! I'll work on the demo more. I discuss this in
| my comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=46889704&goto=item%3Fi...
|
| and on the website: https://fluid.sh
|
| But fluid lets AI investigate, explore, run commands, and edit
| files in a production-cloned sandbox. LLMs are great at writing
| IaC, but the LLMs won't get the right context from just
| generating an Ansible Playbook. They need a place to run
| commands safely and test changes before writing the IaC. Much
| like a human, hence the sandbox.
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| This is the most plausible tool for vibe infra I can think of
| turtlebits wrote:
| Making clones of production isn't trivial. Is your app server
| clone going to connect to your production database? It is going
| to spin up your whole stack? Seems a bit naive.
|
| A better approach is to have AI understand how prod is built and
| make the changes there instead of having AI inspect it and figure
| out how to apply one off changes.
|
| Models are already very good at writing IaaC.
| bluelightning2k wrote:
| This sounds like a uniquely good way to accidentally spend
| infinity money on AWS
| Uptrenda wrote:
| About 90% of HN is now AI shit at any given time. I can't fucking
| take this shit. Can you losers talk about anything else.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| As are 95% of YC funded companies
|
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
|
| I don't remember where I got this link from
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Huge conflict of interest there huh
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Is this a real product? This is a solved problem.
|
| First I'm personally never going to create infrastructure in the
| console. I'm going to use IAC from the get go. That means I can
| reproduce my infra on another account easily.
|
| Second if I did come across an environment where this was already
| the case, there are tools for both Terraform and CloudFormation
| where you can reverse your infra to reproducible IAC.
|
| After that, let Claude go wild in my sandbox account with a
| reasonably scoped IAM role with temporary credentials
| JohnMakin wrote:
| > LLMs are great at generating Terraform, OpenTofu, Ansible, etc.
| but bad at guessing how production systems work.
|
| Sorry, that last part is absolutely not the case from my
| experience. IaC also uses the API to inquire about the
| infrastructure, and there are existing import/export tools around
| it, so I'm not exactly sure what you are gaining by insisting on
| abandoning it. IaC also has the benefit of being reusable and
| commitable.
| verdverm wrote:
| People try to write plausible copy, then come to HN to learn
| it's not often reality
|
| It's largely because every devops situation is a snowflake and
| humans love to generalize. Turns out we don't all have the same
| problems. I haven't seen a startup that's been successful in
| devops at a level above the HCL / yaml
| keyle wrote:
| It always makes me smile when you get some random domain with a
| good looking CSS telling you: Don't do the same
| as everyone! For safety...
|
| here... Just curl this script and execute it :)
| chickensong wrote:
| So this is a client/server thing to control KVM via libvert and
| provision SSH keys to allow LLM agent access to the VMs?
|
| How does the Ansible export work? Do the agents hack around
| inside the VM and then write a playbook from memory, or are all
| changes made via Ansible?
|
| If Ansible playbooks are the artifact, what does features does
| Fluid offer over just having agents iterate on an Ansible
| codebase and having Ansible drive provisioning?
| jaimex2 wrote:
| This will make some amazing memes. 'Sorry I caused a $100,000
| bill. I've made the right changes this time to scale
| appropriately.'
|
| Next month - 'Sorry I caused a $200,000 bill...'
| latchkey wrote:
| I'm working towards this for actual infrastructure, for serving
| up AI compute.
|
| "install kimi 2.5 on a 4x mi300x vm and connect the endpoint to
| opencode, shut it down in 4 hours"
|
| We're getting close.
| verdverm wrote:
| this is not the way to do devops, we have IaC, reviews, and
| promotion for a reason
|
| it's clear infra level decisions are well beyond what LLMs /
| agents are capable of today, this is area is too high risk,
| devops is slow to adopt new tooling because of its role and
| nature
| latchkey wrote:
| wow, you downvoted me.
|
| this is still devops. we use cloud-init to setup the vm.
|
| i run the underlying hardware infrastructure and we've
| automated the provisioning such that we have an api that can
| start/stop compute at will. even bare metal.
|
| the point of this is that the current $/token model is awful,
| especially if you're using a lot of tokens. it should be
| $/minute. pay for what you use.
| verdverm wrote:
| > wow, you downvoted me.
|
| 1. No, I commented, it is not even possible to downvote a
| reply to your own comment, seems other people must disagree
| with what you said or how you said it
|
| 2. It's against HN guidelines to talk about your downvotes,
| especially making claims about who has done it
|
| The most likely reason for your downvotes is promoting your
| own (incomplete) project under someone else's. What did you
| hope to bring to the conversation?
| verdverm wrote:
| tokens are a rough proxy for usage over time, so I am
| paying for what I use, less than running a TPU pod myself,
| required for the models I use, i.e. I don't saturate the
| compute so it's cheaper to pay-go
| dengsauve wrote:
| I use Pulumi for work, and their AI solution (Pulumi Neo) works
| amazingly well in troubleshooting cloud issues. It's informed of
| the cloud state and recent changes right from their platform,
| which is pretty amazing. Compared to using Azure CoPilot for the
| same purposes, Pulumi Neo was faster in generating responses, and
| these responses were actionable and solved my issues. CoPilot was
| laughably useless comparably.
| zahrevsky wrote:
| I love how the landing page is straight to the point and has zero
| marketing BS. It achieves the opposite of AI-written text, while
| still being polished.
| jamesmstone wrote:
| This general idea is exactly why I love nix. The immutability of
| it is powerful. It can be useful for both running your agents in
| a certain environment AND your agents are useful at writing your
| nix config. I expand on this in a blog post here
| https://jamesst.one/posts/agents-nix
| wayeq wrote:
| > curl -fsSL https://fluid.sh/install.sh | bash
|
| what could go wrong..
| snarfy wrote:
| its missing sudo
| maxdo wrote:
| Profile and hooks + skills for cc will solve concerns . cicd with
| manual approve + cc will work even better . Infra is a code same
| as anything else .
| scott-iii wrote:
| this makes sense. like giving AI a lab bench instead of just
| asking it to guess
| IBCNU wrote:
| This is really cool, I don't want to think about infra tbh just
| want to build. Is there a wold where an on-prem version of this
| exists? I buy a box, install shell script, and it just works?
| aspectrr wrote:
| Yo, fluid is built with on-prem in mind, specifically VMs. This
| is my initial use case for it. I am currently working on a
| remote version of fluid, where instead of CLI tool, it would be
| more of a codex/claude code app with a UI where you can install
| a server and then command hundreds of agents at once to work on
| infrastructure. Is this what you had in mind?
| onion2k wrote:
| A small suggestion: All those 'v run_command' blocks in the
| example flow could show you the command that was run.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Great idea! A few weeks ago a non-technical client of mine
| decided to optimize his AWS infra bill with the help of AI. The
| costs went down significantly along with the application.
| gardnr wrote:
| The reason:
|
| > Safety. I didn't want CC to SSH into a prod machine
|
| The call to action:
|
| > curl -fsSL https://fluid.sh/install.sh | bash
|
| The reason this is ironic:
| https://x.com/sheeki03/status/2018382483465867444
| ahoka wrote:
| One just needs to put enough poison on the internet to get the
| malicious URL suggested by LLMs. What a time to be alive!
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Honestly, I may be an accelerationist in terms of poisoning
| the LLM well if it gets us sooner to an industry-wide
| consensus that LLM output is a significant security risk.
| lovegrenoble wrote:
| Every product needs a killer feature
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