Thien Nguyen

My favorite kind of call is the rescue project. A new client comes to us, frustrated. They just paid a ‘modern’ tech agency for a platform that’s completely unmaintainable. We pop the hood, and it’s magnificent. It’s a state-of-the-art “Cloud-Native,” “AI-Powered,” “Event-Driven,” “Serverless” system. A stunning monument to modern engineering, designed to handle 10 million concurrent users for a B2B app that has 500. The previous agency didn’t solve the client’s problem. They solved their own problem: how to get “GenAI” “Kubernetes” and “VectorDB” onto their developers’ resumes. ...

I’m seeing a worrying pattern lately. Almost every product discussion now starts with, “So, how are we using AI for this?” We’re all a bit drunk on the hype. We’re treating AI like magic dust we can just sprinkle on any problem. Clients want a Youtube or Netflix level recommendation engine on day one. Devs, quite reasonably, are excited to put the shiniest new Vector DB on their resumes. We’re starting backward. We’re trying to build the penthouse while the foundation is still a sketch on a napkin. ...

I scroll LinkedIn, what do I see? Perfect headshots. Studio lighting, crazy sharp, precise smiles, not a hair out of place. Perfect posts and comments. Flawless grammar, zero typos. It’s all clean, polished and soulless. This is the Great AI Flood. The cost of looking competent, of sounding smart, has just dropped to zero. And this is where the problem begins. The Collapse of Signal In economics, when you flood a market, the asset’s value collapses. For many years, polished content was a signal of professionalism. Now that AI can produce it instantly, polish has just become noise. ...

Imagine we’re building a simple e-commerce site, “SimpleStore.” The initial planning meeting identifies our needs: A database for users, products, and orders. (Easy: Postgres) A way to send confirmation emails when an order is placed. (Okay, add a RabbitMQ job queue). A cache for the homepage’s “Top 10 Products.” (Fine, add Redis). A full-text search bar. (Ugh. Add Elasticsearch). A nightly job to aggregate sales reports. (Spin up a Cron server). A new AI feature to find “similar” products. (The VCs will love this! Add Pinecone). Before writing a single feature, our architecture diagram is a mess. We have six different systems to provision, monitor, secure, and scale. We have what the team at Supabase calls “dotted line complexity”—the invisible, brittle connections between these systems that will inevitably break in production. ...

As an architect, I’ve seen teams enthusiastically adopt microservices, sold on the dream of “infinite scale” and “team autonomy.” I’ve also seen those same teams a year later, drowning in complexity, wondering why it takes six weeks to add a new feature. “Microservices Hell” is real, and the rent is high. It’s the state you reach when your plumbing is infinitely more complex than the business logic it’s supposed to support. ...

I was on a technical due diligence call with a CTO. He’d already reviewed our profile. “Look,” he said, skipping the pleasantries. “Your deck says ‘HIPAA compliant’ and ‘Security is in Our DNA’. Every vendor says that. My real concern isn’t a hacker from outside; it’s an employee. Someone curious, or someone careless.” He leaned in. “How do you actually stop a logged-in, authenticated doctor from getting curious and pulling the record of another doctor’s patient?” ...