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Comment by bflesch | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 :)

I'm of the school of thought that if a practicing/retired software engineer (i.e. someone I reasonably believe has experience writing software for "production") wrote it, I've got to show it's trash, rather than assume it's trash. "Innocent until proven guilty" and all that. But I'm in the rather luxurious position of mostly using open source, rather than maintaining it, so I understand that others come down differently on this topic.

FWIW, I like the writeup and concept behind this. Very close to some passions of mine (like serving a website from a single-file archive).

Happy to hear, I hope the tool can prove itself to a wider audience then.

if the point is to avoid the lua-issue on nginx, how do you expect people will implement things like geoip, request content match post ssl termination, etc?

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.

The problem with pasting LLM output is that no human with sound mind and body would waste their finite time on this Earth informing you that small static files are "the bread and butter of static sites".

I'm convinced that LLMs somehow settled on the middle manager as the exemplar of human cognition that it tries its best to emulate.

I could totally see "Small static files are the bread and butter of static sites" appearing in some pointless deck on a Zoom call.

> 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.)

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