LLMs are quite capable of rewrites these days - there are few tasks where I'd actually want 10 parallel agents, but rewriting off Next.js would've been faster with that setup.
(I ended up just using the claude web interface and making it use a checklist, took 8 hours)
True, workerd is open source. But the bindings (KV, R2, D1, Queues, etc.) aren't – they're Cloudflare's proprietary services. OpenWorkers includes open source bindings you can self-host.
I tried to run it locally some time ago, but it's buggy as hell when self-hosted. It's not even worth trying out given that CF itself doesn't suggest it.
I'm curious what bugs you encountered. workerd does power the local runtime when you test CF workers in dev via wrangler, so we don't really expect/want it to be buggy..
Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services. I mainly use Claude Code to develop, and it often struggles to replicate the local environment, so I had to create another worker in CF for my local development.
Initially, the idea was to use CF for my side projects as it's much easier than K8S, but after wrestling with it for a month, decided that it's not really worth investing that much, and I moved back to using K8S with FluxCD instead, even though it's overkill as well.
> There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress"
Ughhhh that is because nobody ever looks at the readme so it hasn't been updated basically since workerd was originally released. Sorry. I should really fix that.
> Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services.
workerd itself is a runtime for Workers and Durable Objects, but is not intended to provide implementations of other services like KV, D1, etc. Wrangler / miniflare provides implementations of most of these for local testing purposes, but these aren't really meant for production.
But workers + DO alone is enough to do a whole lot of things...
Thanks a ton for the quick response! I totally get that workerd is not intended to be the emulator of all CF services, but the fact that I will still need an external dependency for local development, and the code I developed can't be used outside of CF environment, makes me feel like I'm locked in to the environment.
I'm mostly using terminal agents to write and deploy code. I made a silly mistake, not reviewing the code before merging it into main (side project, zero user), and my durable object alarms got into an infinite loop, and I got a $400 bill in an hour. There was no way to set rate limits for AI binding in workers, and I didn't get any notification, so I created a support ticket 2 months ago, which hasn't answered to this date.
That was enough for me to move out of CF as a long-time user (>10 years) and believer (CF is still one of my biggest stocks). In a world where AI writes most of the code, it's scary to have the requirement to deploy to a cloud that doesn't have any way to set rate limits.
I learned the hard way that I must use AI Gateway in this situation, but authentication is harder with it, and agents prefer embedded auth, which makes it pick AI binding over AI Gateway. With K8S, it's not easy to maintain, but at least I can fully control the costs without worrying about cost of experimentation.
Lenovo has fantastic recent refurbs. It's a bit of a game, but you can find some for around 400$ or less.
My big beef with Macs is I need BIG ssds. If I want to get a 4TB SSD on a Macbook it starts at around 3000$. Recently I purchased a laptop with 2 SSD slots, although disappointingly only one is easy to access.
I'm tempted to go to Microcenter and tell them to replace the stock SSD with a 4TB( the stock SSD is the one behind a difficult to remove heat sink), and then I'd put another 4 tb ssd. Alternatively I could just pay 800$ for a 8TB SSD, install it in a laptop that cost around 1300-1500$ and I'm only spending 2300$.
On a Mac that's about 5000$. I make music and hate external drives with a passion.
I did something similar to get OnlineOrNot's twitter handle - I realised that unclaimed names would 404 and so I set up a check to get an alert when that happened.
It started as just an uptime checker for websites, eventually I added support for APIs and cron jobs, and automated status pages (you may have seen this one yesterday: https://hackernews.onlineornot.com/)
I started it in 2021, I give it two hours a day before work every workday, and I cut scope on most features to ensure they're shippable in two hours. Then I iterate. It works because it's default-alive. I keep a full time job to be able to build it exactly how I want.
Like my React blog, I started it knowing thousands of others were doing the same thing. I made a bet that my unique perspective would be useful to others, and it paid off.
Has been above $500/mo since 2022, growing steadily since (still a few years away from being able to replace my salary).
This interests me because I recently started building my own monitoring service but stopped because of the existing / entrenched competitors. While it was fun to build the PoC I got to a point where it was becoming "work" and I questioned the ROI. How did you decide to persevere despite this?
I had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.
Not completely, I'm not logged in on my work laptop and it was only working some of the time (and not like some pages were cached and some weren't, I was refreshing the same page and sometimes it worked and sometimes not).
also went down if you went to login, and people's individual pages were also down. So as far as I saw the front page was up as long as you were not logged in, however I'm not sure if that wasn't just luck of the draw, I had one experience where it looked like maybe the front page was sometimes down for not logged in users as well.
on edit: ok others pointed out it was cached pages I saw. explains it.
(I ended up just using the claude web interface and making it use a checklist, took 8 hours)
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