Reading up on MongoDB

Database vendors charge high prices but earn slim profits because they must recover large fixed costs, constantly innovate to avoid commoditization, and compete against cloud providers who own the underlying infrastructure.

Investing in codebase constraints like strong types and modularity compounds AI agent effectiveness, enabling small teams to outpace legacy-encumbered organizations.

HN commenters debate soft delete tradeoffs, noting schema drift, compliance conflicts, and performance issues, with many preferring archival tables or CDC over flags.

A retrospective on 30 years of web development, tracing the evolution from CGI scripts to modern frameworks, concluding the state of web development in 2025 is vastly improved.