How Two Databases Quietly Break Your RBAC and GDPR StoryA vector workload that dropped to $200/month on pgvector exposed the real cost of two-database architectures: the operational and compliance drag that never shows up on an invoice.ArticlesSoftware Engineering
Software Engineering
Engineering perspectives on building scalable systems, conducting experiments, and solving technical challenges at Meta scale. From architecture decisions to measurement frameworks.
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6 articles
How Two Databases Quietly Break Your RBAC and GDPR StoryA vector workload that dropped to $200/month on pgvector exposed the real cost of two-database architectures: the operational and compliance drag that never shows up on an invoice.
Optical Blast Radius: When a $10 Laser Bricks a $40,000 GPUThe industry crowned silicon photonics as the answer to AI's copper wall. But optics doesn't remove the scaling constraint, it relocates it onto TSMC's packaging lines and a handful of Indium Phosphide fabs.
AI Coding Won't Cut Your Costs, It Relocates Them to CIAI made writing code nearly free, and quietly moved the entire cost of engineering into CI pipelines, senior review queues, and token bills that compound while agents wait. Here's where the money actually went.
AI Killed Language Lock-In. Ecosystem Gravity Survived ItAI can now translate any language into any other, so language lock-in is dying. But the moat didn't disappear, it moved to the dependency tree, the ORM, and the runtime contracts no model can cheaply port.
Velocity Inflation: Your PR Volume Doubled and Nobody ShippedAI tooling makes pull requests pile up while deployment frequency flatlines. The bottleneck moved from writing code to understanding it, and most engineering metrics still measure the wrong end of the pipeline.
Second-Order Effects of AI Agents Becoming Software's Primary UsersWhen AI agents become software's primary users, seat-based pricing collapses, engagement metrics invert, and B2B marketing shifts from persuading humans to optimizing for machine comprehension.