thenorthbay

Hey HN,

together with a friend we realized in our engineering jobs that e2e testing is often broken and not worth the effort. But AI Agents could change this massively.

There are a couple of reasons why AI agents could revive the topic:

- LLMs can automatically adjust tests to the evolving product by simply looking at the git diff and changes in the UI

- It'll become much easier and cheaper to have functioning E2E tests

Trends supporting this:

- Vibe coding is on the rise and the increasing amount of changes needs to be tested

- Software will be interactive, like games, where the task and suggestion comes to the user instead of the user navigating to the workflow

Are current tools just not good enough yet, or do people simply not care enough about the problem?

I just can't help observe that my developer friends increasingly build on the "low-end", serverful platforms instead of serverless. Many call serverless overkill for the (commercial) apps they want to build. Will this be an ongoing trend?

In recent years, many new serverless service providers have been released for everything (Neon – Postgres, Cloudflare D1 – SQLite-like DB, GCP Functions, Vercel edge functions, etc.). However, people have been complaining about their complexity and overkill in the beginning.

More recently, I've witnessed friends prefer serverful providers for their apps because they offer more control, and are cheaper and simpler to get started with (their words). Serverful platforms like Render, Railway, or Fly.io have also become a bit more popular.

Both approaches come with their trade offs and limitations, especially at different scale and costs.

So, which way, western man: is Serverful the Future? Quo vadis, web development?

Wouldn't it be cool to have a Supabase for SQLite?

The core idea here is: let SQLite run next to your application on the server; but have all features a client-server database give you.

What's the spec for this?

- SQLite runs next to server as production database

- That way, reads and writes are very fast

- In dev, some sort of worker auto-copies the prod DB to the local repo. Production bugs can be reproduced easily and code fixed quickly

- Have an interface that lets you access, view, and modify data in the production DB, kind of like Firebase. Might need a server of its own... or couldn't that just be the app server itself?

- SQLite auto-backs up to a bucket (like Litestream)

I kinda really want this, but haven't found anything quite like it. I've seen Turso, but it seems they focus more on global replication instead of the OSS developer experience I'm looking for.

What do you think? What am I missing?