LLMs are breaking 20 year old system design
Key takeaways
- Web architecture is built on a 20-year-old assumption that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless.
- The cloud-native architecture of the last decade is built on a 20-year-old assumption: that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless.
- LLMs and agents are quietly violating this assumption, and making this architecture increasingly hard to work with.
Web architecture is built on a 20-year-old assumption that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless. But we're missing a routing primitive.
The cloud-native architecture of the last decade is built on a 20-year-old assumption: that state lives in the database, and compute is stateless. If you want to scale, you scale the database vertically (get a larger machine) [1][1] or design the database schema around partition the data and you scale your application servers horizontally (add more boxes). Any request can hit any server, the loadbalancer doesn t care, and the database is the single source of truth.
LLMs and agents are quietly violating this assumption, and making this architecture increasingly hard to work with. Not all at once, but in three subtle ways: