infrastructure
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The Weight of a Checkbox
Our own setup wizard downloaded 1.9 megabytes and made 127 network requests to put six checkboxes on the screen. We rebuilt it to make three. On a developer laptop the rebuilt path is seven times faster. On rural LTE it is nearly fifty times faster, because delay is charged per round trip and one of those paths makes 127 of them.
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The $70,000 Illusion
Mintlify says sandboxes for their AI assistant would cost $70,000 a year. The actual cost on self-hosted hardware is $1,368. The 51x gap between the headline and the math tells a story about how infrastructure decisions get made in AI.