DHH mentioned they built it to move from the cloud to bare metal. He glorifies the simplicity but I can't help thinking they are a special use case of predictable, non-huge load.
Uber, for example, moved to the cloud. I feel like in the span between them there are far more companies for which Kamal is not enough.
I hope I'm wrong, though. It'll be nice for many companies to be have the choice of exiting the cloud.
I feel Uber is the outlier here. For every unicorn company there are 1000s of companies that don't need to scale to millions of users.
And due to the insane markup of many cloud services it can make sense to just use beefier servers 24/7 to deal with the peaks. From my experience crazy traffic outliers that need sophisticated auto-scaling rarely happens outside of VC-fueled growth trajectories.
That seems like a low bar because it already is- it's just not equally distributed yet.
My own productivity has grown far more than 10% thanks to AI, and I don't just mean in terms of dev. It reads my bloodwork results, speeds up my ability to repair a leak in my toilet tank, writes a concise "no I won't lend you money; I barely know you" message... you name it.
Normally all of those things would take much longer and I'd get worse results on my own.
If that's what I can do at the personal level, then surely 10% is an easily-achievable improvement at the enterprise level.
Some regions or sectors might have experienced higher growth spurts, but the main point stands: the overall economic growth was quite low by modern standards - even though I don't think GDP numbers alone adequately describe the huge societal changes of such sustained growth compared to agrarian cultures before the Industrial Revolution.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20071127032512/http://minneapoli... [1] https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/explainers/how-has-growth-ch... [2] https://academic.oup.com/ereh/article/21/2/141/3044162