How we built a codegen solution for SDKs to create humanlike code
In this technical retrospective (2023), @jelambs shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 7 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
We recently built our own codegen solution to automatically create, maintain, and document our backend SDKs so that we didn’t have to compromise on either quality or maintenance burden. Also see part one of the series where we discuss how compiler theory inspired our solution: https://stytch.com/blog/what-does-compiler-theory-have-to-do-with-auth/ ↗