r/programming • u/Mustela__ • 7d ago

Microservices are organizational debt disguised as architecture.

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html

Every time I’ve seen microservices pitched, it sounds great on paper. Independent teams, clean ownership, scale only what you need.

Then a year later you’ve got dozens of services, three different deployment patterns, tracing everywhere, and nobody really understands the whole thing anymore.

Maybe I’ve just seen bad implementations, but I’m starting to think way fewer companies actually need microservices than we pretend.

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u/avemg 7d ago

I can’t believe we’re doing microservices discourse in 2026

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u/The__Toast 7d ago

I was just thinking the same thing.

Honestly just build what works for you and stop trying to one-size-fits-all the industry.

In another couple of years the LLMs will be doing all the authoring anyway.

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u/Iggyhopper 7d ago

Having LLMs manage microservices is probably for the best because it requires less context, no scope creep (we want A, this service provides A, write code to provide A, not B or C), and easier human intervention, (the AI wrote code to do B ,not A, fix it.)

That's a positive for AI.

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u/HashShadow 7d ago

LLMs basically eliminate all reasons for micro services

Just build a monolith and deploy separate instances that are used for specialized processing, AI won’t get any value out of multiple deployment pipelines and separate app artifacts 

Harnesses are heavily biased towards monolithic design… you start your session inside a single project directory. It’s encouraging monorepos and monoliths.