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bfleschyesterday at 5:00 PM3 repliesview on HN

Looks good, nice features. But somehow the spark does not ignite on my side because it feels too artificial. I don't know if the metrics are faked, if the convenience functions actually work, if there is any proper hardening.

I can accept if stuff is vibe coded and has autogenerated README. But even the announcement blogpost is AI-generated, and I personally have zero data points to see if your understanding of software quality is the same as mine.

It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.


Replies

losfairyesterday at 5:29 PM

Hi, author here - a few critical pieces of this, like async-ebpf, were written long before those coding agents were released. I use AI assistance a lot when creating zeroserve itself, but I manually check AI output and take responsibility for it :)

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gigatexalyesterday at 5:04 PM

Given the benchmarks:

Small static file (174 B) - the bread and butter of static sites:

server req/s p99

zeroserve 36,681 5.4 ms

nginx 31,226 7.8 ms

Caddy 12,830 22 ms

zeroserve serves small files about 17% faster than nginx on a single core, with a tighter tail. HTML pages, small JSON, CSS - this is the case zeroserve is tuned for.

Large static file (100 KB):

server req/s throughput p99

zeroserve 8,000 782 MB/s 22 ms

nginx 7,600 773 MB/s 28 ms

Caddy 6,084 590 MB/s 44 ms

I'd go with a more storied project that's been audited, battle tested, hardened etc than this upstart. There's not enough improvement to justify the risk.

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shevy-javayesterday at 8:12 PM

> It's a weird world, if this would've been announced without any AI disclaimers some years earlier I would've eaten it up without a doubt. But right now if I see a fancy README with several good-looking command line parameters I immediately wonder if the README is hallucinated and the command line parameters actually exist.

Yeah, that is unfortunate. Recently there was this ffmpeg-wasm project. I tested it. It worked. But it was vibe-coded AI. I can't stand AI. Even if things work.

I decided to stay in the oldschool era as much as possible. Clever people publish software. Clever people maintain software. They don't need AI. That's my niche.

We may die out but I still prefer that. (Oh, and only if these clever people write documentation. Many clever people hate writing documentation. I decided a long time ago that if software comes without documentation, it is not worth my time, no matter how great that documentation is. This refers mostly to on-the-application side; I only rarely looked at the Linux documentation, but others stated that it is not too terrible either, so who knows.)