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I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things). I feel like Futo is going in the wro

I like this article more than I like Immich. It’s well structured, helpful, and kind (not that Immich isn’t those things). I feel like Futo is going in the wrong direction. In the age of AI, anyone can write a DB query, anyone can design a simple UI, and with docker the structure of hosting is no longer a barrier. I think Futo and Immich should be focusing on data itself. Export, import, store, parse metadata, process, suggest relationships

illiac786 14d ago
Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most. The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N. I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI. The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)
- joshspankit 13d ago
  You missed the core of what I was saying: not vibe code a whole thing end to end (I agree, not sustainable), embrace the idea of having devs build the storage, parsers, schema, and security and let everyone vibe code the rest. Like, let’s use a simple photos example: a photo file has metadata standards already embedded, but doesn’t store it’s edit history, event, or who’s in it. Immich already does a lot that’s great here with parsers and ML and if they changed focus to the data storage layer they could essentially boil down to a table for edit history, a table for events, a table for people, etc, the ability to store in SQLite or sidecars, and an API layer for people to hand to their AI. Not only would it reduce the dev load, but then we could have an ever-expanding sphere of personal data ownership as Futo adds schemas/tables for video, audio, documents, and maybe everything else most people need to build their own UIs for specific uses or even “god view” UIs.
  - illiac786 6d ago
    I am really not following. If “anyone” can write a GUI, how does moving it away from the devs reduce load? Either it’s a lot of work for devs and then even more so for “anyone” or it’s easy for everyone.
    - joshspankit 5d ago
      For simplicity of explaining, I’m going to group web software parts in to “hard” and “easy” with AI assistance hard: - Overall security - User permissions in multi-user deployments - Input sanitization - RDBMS schema design - Parsing - Bit-rot protection (here because it’s rarely on the radar of the general user) easy: - DB queries against a known schema - Working in a front end HTML/CSS/JS stack - Making UI components - Moving those components around To your question about why moving front end away from devs would reduce load: a person making a UI they want is a different category of work than creating a UI that everyone wants. Even if it’s easy, it’s distracting to be thinking about everyone’s use-cases and refining the details.
Dylan16807 14d ago
If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.

illiac786 14d ago

Everyone can write it, sure. You can even maintain it. You just can’t do it for every single SaaS service in your life, it’s not sustainable for most. The sane approach is: Is there something out there with a solid community that fulfils this need? If yes, let’s not vibe code project N. I think there is this huge wave of projects which will die off when the devs realise the time it takes to maintain it, even with AI. The amount of code produced will remain significantly higher than before AI, but it will go down a bit, compared to the peak (and I’m not sure we’ve reached peak)

joshspankit 13d ago
You missed the core of what I was saying: not vibe code a whole thing end to end (I agree, not sustainable), embrace the idea of having devs build the storage, parsers, schema, and security and let everyone vibe code the rest. Like, let’s use a simple photos example: a photo file has metadata standards already embedded, but doesn’t store it’s edit history, event, or who’s in it. Immich already does a lot that’s great here with parsers and ML and if they changed focus to the data storage layer they could essentially boil down to a table for edit history, a table for events, a table for people, etc, the ability to store in SQLite or sidecars, and an API layer for people to hand to their AI. Not only would it reduce the dev load, but then we could have an ever-expanding sphere of personal data ownership as Futo adds schemas/tables for video, audio, documents, and maybe everything else most people need to build their own UIs for specific uses or even “god view” UIs.
- illiac786 6d ago
  I am really not following. If “anyone” can write a GUI, how does moving it away from the devs reduce load? Either it’s a lot of work for devs and then even more so for “anyone” or it’s easy for everyone.
  - joshspankit 5d ago
    For simplicity of explaining, I’m going to group web software parts in to “hard” and “easy” with AI assistance hard: - Overall security - User permissions in multi-user deployments - Input sanitization - RDBMS schema design - Parsing - Bit-rot protection (here because it’s rarely on the radar of the general user) easy: - DB queries against a known schema - Working in a front end HTML/CSS/JS stack - Making UI components - Moving those components around To your question about why moving front end away from devs would reduce load: a person making a UI they want is a different category of work than creating a UI that everyone wants. Even if it’s easy, it’s distracting to be thinking about everyone’s use-cases and refining the details.

Dylan16807 14d ago

If a thousand people ask an AI for a generic photo app, that's not only a huge waste of time and money, a lot of them are going to experience data loss because of it. And only a couple will know how to use docker.