Even if that's true: Okay, so why "UNLICENSED" instead of "CC0-1.0"? Especially for a trivial example? Or I guess MIT or something if you really care about something at the same level as hello world?
noob question, i'm currently adding telemetry to my backend.
I was at first implementing otel throughout my api, but ran into some minor headaches and a lot of boilerplate. I shopped a bit around and saw that Sentry has a lot of nice integrations everywhere, and seems to have all the same features (metrics, traces, error reporting). I'm considering just using Sentry for both backend and frontend and other pieces as well.
Curious if anyone has thoughts on this. Assuming Sentry can fulfill our requirements, the only thing taht really concerns me is vendor-lockin. But I'm wondering other people's thoughts
>I was at first implementing otel throughout my api, but ran into some minor headaches and a lot of boilerplate
OTeL also has numerous integrations https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/registry/. In contrast, Sentry lacks traditional metrics and other capabilities that OTeL offers. IIRC, Sentry experimented with "DDM" (Delightful Developer Metrics), but this feature was deprecated and removed while still in alpha/beta.
Sentry excels at error tracking and provides excellent browser integration. This might be sufficient for your needs, but if you're looking for the comprehensive observability features that OpenTelemetry provides, you'd likely need a full observability platform.
Think of otel as just a standard data format for your logs/traces/metrics that your backend(s) emit, and some open source libraries for dealing with that data. You can pipe it straight to an observability vendor that accepts these formats (pretty much everyone does - datadog, stackdriver, etc) or you can simply write the data to a database and wire up your own dashboards on top of it (i.e. graphana).
Otel can take a little while to understand because, like many standards, it's designed by committee and the code/documentation will reflect that. LLMs can help but the last time I was asking them about otel they constantly gave me code that was out of date with the latest otel libraries.
I'd say "track errors first" [0] and focus on APM later (if at all). If you're worried about Sentry's lock-in, know that there are API-compatible drop-in replacements[1][2] though they are less feature-complete on the APM/observability side.
Ops type here, Otel is great but if your metrics are not there, please fix that. In particular, consider just import prometheus_client and going from there.
Prometheus is bog easy to run, Grafana understands it and anything involving alerting/monitoring from logs is bad idea for future you, I PROMISE YOU, PLEASE DON'T!
It’s trivial to alter or remove log lines without knowing or realizing that it affects some alerting or monitoring somewhere.
That’s why there are dedicated monitoring and alerting systems to start with.
If you need an artifact from your system, it should be tested. We test our logs and many types of metrics. Too many incidents from logs or metrics changing and no longer causing alerts. Never got to build out my alert test bed that exercises all know alerts in prod, verifying they continue to work.
Biggest one, sample rate is much higher (every log) and this can cause problems if service goes haywire and starts spewing logs everywhere. Logging pipelines tend to be very rigid as well for various reasons. Metrics are easier to handle as you can step back sample rate, drop certain metrics or spin up additional Prometheus instances.
Logging format becomes very rigid and if the company goes multiple languages, this can be problematic as different languages can behave differently. Is this exception something we care about or not? So we throw more code in attempt to get logging alerting into state that does not drive everyone crazy where if we were just doing "rate(critical_errors[5m] > 10" in Prometheus, we would be all set!
Sentry isn’t really a full on observability platform. It’s for error reporting only (that is annotated with traces and logs). It turns out that for most projects, this is sufficient. Can’t comment on the vendor lock-in part.
You can run your own sentry server (or at least last time I worked with it you could). But as others have noted sentry is not going to provide the same functionality as OTel.
The word "can" is doing a lot of work in your comment, based on the now horrific number of moving parts[1] and I think David has even said the self-hosting story isn't a priority for them. Also, don't overlook the license, if your shop is sensitive to non-FOSS licensing terms
Next and RSCs have become some of the most frustrating things I've worked with on frontend. Dealing with FE is already annoying enough, but having to wrestle the magic of Next and then vendor lock-in to Vercel to top it off.
Team is trying out Tanstack router + vite this week. Excited to build a regular ass CSA.
It's fine if you know them well. The unclarity in boundaries between client and server components, and the unintentional complexity that brings, is just frustrating to work with. I will gladly take a CSA any day.
But don't let a random internet stranger detract you. If it works for you, go for it.
URCL is sending me down a rabbithole. Haven't looked super deeply yet, but the most hilarious timeline would be that an IR built for Minecraft becomes a viable compilation target for languages.
Partially agree. But I can't help thinking this is the natural lifecycle of protocols. They first start as open projects, proliferate as such, and evolve into standards with governance once they catch on.
What would you call these projects? Open protocols?
I've found myself having brand loyalty to Claude. I don't really trust any of the other models with coding, the only one I even let close to my work is Claude. And this is after trying most of them. Looking forward to trying 4.
Much like others, this is my stack (or o1-pro instead of Gemini 2.5 Pro). This is a big reason why I use aider for large projects. It allows me to effortlessly combine architecture models and code writing models.
I know in Cursor and others I can just switch models between chats, but it doesn't feel intentional the way aider does. You chat in architecture mode, then execute in code mode.
I also use Aider (lately, always with 3.7-sonnet) and really enjoy it, but over the past couple of weeks, the /architect feature has been pretty weird. It previously would give me points (e.g. 1. First do this, 2. Then this) and, well, an architecture. Now it seems to start spitting out code like crazy, and sometimes it even makes commits. Or it thinks it has made commits, but hasn't. Have you experienced anything like this? What am I doing wrong?
The idea is that some models are better at reasoning about code, but others are better at actually creating the code changes (without syntax errors, etc). So Aider lets you pick two models - one does the architecting, and the other does the code change.
I have been very brand loyal to claude also but the new gemini model is amazing and I have been using it exclusively for all of my coding for the last week.
I am excited to try out this new model. I actually want to stay brand loyal to antropic because I like the people and the values they express.
Yah Claude tends to output 1200+ line architectural specification documents while Gemini tends to output ~600 line. (I just had to write 100+ architectural spec documents for 100+ different apps)
Not sure why Claude is more thorough and complete than the other models, but it's my go-to model for large projects.
The OpenAI model outputs are always the smallest - 500 lines or so. Not very good at larger projects, but perfectly fine for small fixes.
I'd interested to hear more about your workflow. I use Gemini for discussing the codebase, making ADR entries based on discussion, ticket generation, documenting the code like module descriptions and use cases+examples, and coming up with detailed plans for implementation that cursor with sonnet can implement. Do you have any particular formats, guidelines or prompts? I don't love my workflow. I try to keep everything in notion but it's becoming a pain. I'm pretty new to documentation and proper planning, but I feel like it's more important now to get the best use out of the llms. Any tips appreciated!
For a large project, the real human trick for you to do is to figure out how to partition it down to separate apps, so that individual LLMs can work on them separately, as if they were their own employees in separate departments.
You then ask LLMs to first write features for the individual apps (in Markdown), giving it some early competitive guidelines.
You then tell LLMs to read that features document, and then write an architectural specification document. Tell it to maybe add example data structures, algorithms, or user interface layouts. All in Markdown.
You then feed these two documents to individual LLMs to write the rest of the code, usually starting with the data models first, then the algorithms, then the user interface.
Again, the trick is to partition your project to individual apps. Also an app isn't the full app. It might just be a data schema, a single GUI window, a marketing plan, etc.
The other hard part is to integrate the apps back together at the top level if they interact with each other...
Awesome, thanks! It's interesting how the most effective LLM use for coding kind of enforces good design principles. It feels like good architects/designers are going to be more important than ever.
Edit- Except maybe TDD? Which kind of makes me wonder if TDD was a good paradigm to begin with. I'm not sure, but I'm picturing an LLM writing pretty shitty/hacky code if its goal is just passing tests. But I've never really tried TDD either before or after LLM so I should probably shut up.
Same. And I JUST tried their GitHub Action agentic thing yesterday (wrote about it here[0]), and it honestly didn't perform very well. I should try it again with Claude 4 and see if there are any differences. Should be an easy test
Gemini 2.5 Pro replaced Claude 3.7 for me after using nothing but claude for a very long time. It's really fast, and really accurate. I can't wait to try Claude 4, it's always been the most "human" model in my opinion.
Something I’ve found true of Claude, but not other models, is that when the benchmarks are better, the real world performance is better. This makes me trust them a lot more and keeps me coming back.
It’s possible to get to know the quirks of these models and intuit what will and won’t work, and how to overcome those limitations. It’s also possible to just get to know, like, and trust their voice. I’m certain that brand awareness is also a factor for me in preferring Claude over ChatGPT etc
I think it really depends on how you use it. Are you using an agent with it, or the chat directly?
I've been pretty disappointed with Cursor and all the supported models. Sometimes it can be pretty good and convenient, because it's right there in the editor, but it can also get stuck on very dumb stuff and re-trying the same strategies over and over again
I've had really good experiences with o4-high-mini directly on the chat. It's annoying going back and forth copying/pasting code between editor and the browser, but it also keeps me more in control about the actions and the context
Would really like to know more about your experience
I also use DeepSeek R1 as a daily driver. Combined with Qwen3 when I need better tool usage.
Now that both Google and Claude are out, I expect to see DeepSeek R2 released very soon. It would be funny to watch an actual open source model getting close to the commercial competition.
R1 takes more time to answer, but I don't remember a single case where I actually compared answers where R1 was worse than pure V3.
And I don't even have to wait that long. If I watch the thinking, I can spot quickly it misunderstood me and rephrase the question without even waiting for the full response.
A nice thing about Deepseek is that it is so cheap to run. It's nice being able to explore conversational trees without getting a $12 bill at the end of it.
Will give this a try. I was using claude code to make a small game in love2d, and really hoped for a nice lua ecs lib to help manage the game objects (its my first time playing around with game dev).
