Earlier, I was using Zoho and FastMail (however you dice it, it will use some money, $12 a year for Zoho and $7 per month for FastMail? Even then, perhaps you only get one mailbox and some aliases)
but with this method, I get unlimited aliases, domains, and mailboxes:
Now, I wrote a script which captures the email and saves attachments to S3 using the HTTP API (why S3 and not R2? Because Cloudflare wanted a credit card, and I was too lazy to add it there lol) and emails to D1.
This uses an email -> webworker workflow.
I use an API to fetch my emails.
This means all my inbound emails are now handled by Cloudflare, and I can easily use all of it with zero payment.
The best part is this supports tokenised emails, so I can provide a unique email address to each service I sign up for.
I am using SES as the sender. I’ve set up one script which auto-sets up any domain in SES and auto-verifies the sender email.
The funniest thing is I am receiving zero spam? As if other email providers sell my email?
That's not a well kept secret, that's just a workflow that almost nobody would accept for their email setup which is the center of most people's digital identify and should always work and not be a duct taped construct to save a couple of bucks.
It's not about the uptime or scalability. Everyone has to make the choice for themselves if they value their time less than $12/year (Or free if Google is an option) for a critical part of their digital infrastructure to set all these moving parts up and keep them running over years.
I'll stick to Fastmail, where if something isn't working as expected I can just email them and get a response from a real human.
that's the thing it cannot stop working because webworker and email forwarding is very reliable, email itself has retries built it and soft bounce handling.
Just a heads up I have seen complaints about CF email forwarding completely dropping emails that failed to pass certain SPF validation. They get completely dropped and the worker doesn't get called and they don't get forwarded, rather than in something like Gmail it would end up in spam
Most of the sysadmin and devops team have been downsized in India because of AI.
Basically, now it's trivial for any new devops guy to run such a query in Claude Code:
“Log in to this production server, find out all services it runs and their deployment method, create documentation about everything, and generate a repeatable, auditable deployment workflow.”
Devops and sysadmins can no longer withhold information to maintain job security.
Boom, 80% of the team gone.
I know companies are doing migrations of production Postgres and MySQL on 1000s of machines using AI agents.
I’m imagining how many SaaS will be automated out and simply be an "agent skill" in ClaudeCode.
Can you support this claim with some evidence? Not just about the redundancies, but I’m also particularly interested in hard data showing Claude is capable of doing that kind of research with near 100% verifiable accuracy and migrations with no data loss and equivalent functionality (which is required to sustain your claim).
> Devops and sysadmins can no longer withhold information to maintain job security.
I can't imagine this is very prevalent. That's a very 2004-style corporate immaturity; I get the sense that even the slow-moving behemoths of the software world have mostly caught up to, say ... 2017's recognition of the importance of automation and reproducibility and won't tolerate the kind of malpractice you describe--wilful information siloing by infrastructure teams.
Like, those businesses might well suck at automation! But they've been doing it and firing the people who resist it for a long while now.
Only downsized? I would expect them to cease to exist entirely in the coming years, as western companies begin to realize that AI is cheaper and more competent than the Indian firms they usually outsource work to.
And when it goes wrong, production is down, until they can get a real devops to look at what shit the AI-only guys did wrong. Haha, no serious shop would act like that, but then again most shops are not serious, now are they? So you might have a point.
I've never liked those "focus hijacking guided tours" and never really followed through any such onboarding process.
But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.
You gotta understand, people will use the product you made, in a way that makes sense to them, not according to your devised "one way". And that's fine because it allows user to own his workflow using your product.
I like the "checklist" and "load sample data" approach better.
This is primary reason perhaps why my apps are growing fast.
> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.
The great secret of the industry is that it's mostly run by clueless incompetents. And their only strategy is to copy from every other product because they don't have original ideas or enough conviction to lead in a new direction. They just want to show up, punch thier timecard and go home, so we get the laziest suite of product implementation possible.
>> But they are so common, i don't know who designs them and makes me feel like 5yo.
Often these are the product managers building follow-on features that don't get the usage they want. Users aren't using them, but monthly usage is the currency of so much PM work that they have to try to draw attention to it.
It's a race to the bottom, for any tool out there the negative reviews boil down to complexity. If not: no instruction.
Some people don't know how to operate a TV remote controller, unless it has 1 or 2 buttons.
It's protection against the frustration that a few experience: ultimately unable to use a thing or jam it. At the expense of the majority bugged by mild distraction.
I think if I'm honest, I don't deeply know everything about most of the products that I use. And if I were to dive deeply, I would spend all my time learning products than doing anything with them.
For me it is not a mild distraction. If it was one product it would be easier to take it in stride but I literally close hundreds of modal dialogs that never should have opened in the first place every day.
I don't like the focus-hijacking things because it tends to obscure the parts of the UI that you will have to deal with in the next experience. You are given an accelerated tour that does not match the muscle-memory that you will need when you actually use it.
Raising the visibility of something, or pointing an arrow at it is fine, but don't dim and block the rest of the UI immediately because I might need it for context to understand what the hell you want me to click next and why. If I can't do that, then it's just a forced speedrun of 20 steps that I will immediately forget.
It feels like many of these forgot that the point is to teach for the future, not to boost extremely short term interaction metrics. Showing (much less a single time) is not usually enough to teach, you need to establish context so they understand why instead of just what, and generally offer repetition.
UI/UX design is a dead art. Probably because it costs money and requires actual thought.
It feels like vendors just tack on the first thing that pops into their head. How do we tell users about the new feature? Pop-up dialog! That should work.
As someone who once had a popular open-source project. Opensource is just harder because you've to write code for <optics>. When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive. Despite what people here say, all these things have very little to do with the reliability of actual code.
Same software i offer for free will take 2-5x more time if i did it opensource way.
> When I am working with a small team, I do not care if my commits are ugly or repetitive.
thats interesting because for me its the opposite: working in a team boosted my code quality and cleanliness much more than something open source i did precisely because people on my team would be looking at it and reviewing it...
I think it's the third or forth time I see you bragging about HN how many apps you're able to develop with AI now. Care to link any of them, especially where we can see the actual code that you've produced here? Without being able to see actual results, I'm not sure what you want people to take away from your repeated comments.
I only write here because people are spreading doomerism here with AI and I am excited about future.
Well I am competing with geoip provider like maxmind.
I developed custom traceroute and ping service to geolocate IPs with very high accuracy beating products like digital element, maxmind, ipinfo
These companies have huge teams. But my 3 people company already beat them.
Code doesn't matter much, it's not an opensource project.
My free app is http://macrocodex.app which I've developed along with a fitness coach.
I am currently beating companies with 20-30 developers and closing more deals while having 1/10th of the staff.
I am simply very excited about all this.
Nobody cares show you solve the problem, or if your code is ugly. As long as it's reliable and without downtime, you aren't breaking things and causing your customer headache, you are winning.
Even before AI, bad code existed. Not every company had 10x developer writing beautiful idiomatic rust code.
AI is just a tool, people who are trying to generate whole codebase with it are doing something very wrong. You can write code faster with AI provided you understand its strength and weakness
> Code doesn't matter much, it's not an opensource project.
Heh, you're in for a rude awakening, sometime in the future :) But I won't spoil the surprise, you clearly have made up your mind about what to focus on.
> My free app is http://macrocodex.app which I've developed along with a fitness coach.
Crazy, this app you've run for ~1-2 months has 10K active users already, even though there is zero info about who runs it, zero reviews, and says "Download on the App Store" on the landing page even though you then ask people to use the web app, impressive.
I don't think anyone said using AI can't produce a ton of code really quickly, and no one is finding that difficult to manage either. But most of us software engineers are trying to build long-lasting codebases with AI too, then "less === better" typically, so it's not about being able to spit out features as fast as possible, but avoid the evergrowing codebase from collapsing on top of itself, and each prompt not getting slower and slower, but as fast as on a greenfield project.
Sounds like you've found the holy grail of being able to avoid that, kudos if so. Judging by you giving zero care to how the design and architecture actually is, I kind of find that hard to believe. But, if it works for you, it works for you, not up to me or others to dictate how you build stuff, hope you enjoy it, however you build stuff :)
>Heh, you're in for a rude awakening, sometime in the future :) But I won't spoil the surprise; you clearly have made up your mind about what to focus on.
>Even though there is zero info about who runs it.
People in the community already know who runs it; most others don't care. You won't get 10K users without people getting results. It's a free app, so not like I am spending bucks to advertise it on social networks.
The app is completely free, doesn't upload data to any server (other than Sentrycrash reporting), doesn't ask for any email or phone number. When people get results, they share them with their friends. That's how it's growing.
>Says "Download on the App Store" on the landing page even though you then ask people to use the web app.
Why even bother asking a guy with the statistical acumen to think he can make a reliable estimate of a monthly average from some span of time shorter than two months? He's probably just going to say it doesn't matter and unfortunately he's probably right. If you sound excited enough, you can convince other people and close deals, so who gives a shit if there's really a there there? We'll see how he's doing in another decade. Reminds me of my sister always trying to get into real estate and mortage brokerage speculation, glowing whenever there's a market spike about people pulling in 200 grand a month, yet 25 years later she's still broke, doesn't own her own house, and her daughter is constantly asking me for money instead of her.
> statistical acumen to think he can make a reliable estimate of a monthly average from some span of time shorter than two months
Perhaps because those numbers are provided on the Playstore dashboard? You should question Google's acumen in providing those statistics to developers?
And people have been estimating ARR through projections for a long time.
Similarly, i see google releasing advancement after advancement in LLM yet i see antigravity sub where people are crying all time.
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