I think there is a need for Agent-first tooling for things like CMS.
> Previously, we could @cursor and ask it to modify the code and content, but now we introduced a new CMS abstraction in between.
That is a very real benefit to having everything accessible by Agents. Whenever I need to setup connections in web UIs, it slows me down. IaC is a huge step in the right direction for Agent workflows, but so much is still locked away like CMS management, Confluence docs, Jira tickets, etc.
The difficult process is on purpose. You're too small. You're just going to waste their customer support resources and only give them maybe a couple hundred dollars. They're hoping you give up and go away.
We're a reasonably sized company. Recently we needed to change our google cloud payment details.
Finance users had changed in the meantime, so I navigate and create an iam user, ok, billing administrator is a thing, great.
Oh, they said it didn't work? alright, there seems to be a project billing administrator as well as an organisation billing administrator? weird, ok let's try that.
Hmm... it still didn't work? let's look around a little more. Ok, within the billing account (that they're a billing administrator to) and within the organisation (that they're a billing administrator to) there is a tab called "payment users". This seems to be _separate_ from their IAM users, and the person needs to be added there (as well as? instead of? who knows) and _then_ they can change the card details.
UX is especially crap here (for google cloud billing).
Let's not even get started on the whole vertex vs. aistudio stuff. Also when one of the gemini's came out their python library worked while their curl docs, and their ruby client didn't so we had to read the source of the python library to figure out what it actually did under the hood to test it out. (this was a while ago, I think they might've gotten better since but the documentation/devex was really bad at at the time)
It's worked in the past. But it does require someone at your org to care that CI times are spiking, which is not always a thing you can rely upon.
In addition: if CI is the only place the issue shows up, and never in a user interaction... Why does that software exist in the first place? In that context, the slowdown may be serving as a useful signal to the project to drop the entire dependency.
ETA: To be clear, I don't do this as a substitute for a regular deprecation cycle (clear documentation, clear language-supported warnings / annotations, clear timeline to deprecate); I do it in addition before the final yank that actually breaks end-users.
That assumes two things: 1. That such a tool couldn’t be limited to the big players (it could) and 2. That “small sites trying to run ads to get by,” aren’t part of the problem. I can understand why someone would believe this, but I believe the web would be a better place without them. These sites are all pretty much designed (poorly) around their ads, which limits their usefulness. Have you tried looking up recipes online? A bread recipe with 5 ingredients is 30 pages long!!!
I don’t think it harms the publishers. If the ad network (well, Google) does detect it, I think they just won’t pay for the “fraudulent”¹ clicks? (And in best case scenario, you’re actually helping small sites!)
Advertisers on the other hand will pay for nothing, yes. Some of them are small businesses. I wonder if there’s a way to click on big corp ads only...
For unit testing, I still use TestContainers which spins a full Postgres in Docker. But new alternatives like this make py-pglite (https://github.com/wey-gu/py-pglite) possible which is Python unit testing with PGlite. Even so, for Python unit testing I'm more confident in something like pgserver (https://github.com/orm011/pgserver) which offers the full, real Postgres in a lightweight pip package. Note: my take is specifically for unit testing, not other use cases!
> Previously, we could @cursor and ask it to modify the code and content, but now we introduced a new CMS abstraction in between.
That is a very real benefit to having everything accessible by Agents. Whenever I need to setup connections in web UIs, it slows me down. IaC is a huge step in the right direction for Agent workflows, but so much is still locked away like CMS management, Confluence docs, Jira tickets, etc.
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