🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Ah, terrific. A blog post about solving the single greatest challenge facing modern enterprises: the crushing, soul-destroying task of writing a two-paragraph changelog. I was just telling the board that our Q3 earnings were jeopardized by the high operational cost of typing git commit -m "add new feature docs". Thank goodness PlanetScale and their friends at Cursor are here to guide us to the promised land with a solution that involves an LLM, a custom command syntax, and a Slack bot. My heart palpitates with the sheer fiscal prudence of it all.

Let’s just peel back the layers of this particular onion, shall we? Because it’s already making my eyes water. They’ve engineered a multi-stage, cross-platform, AI-driven workflow to replace what is, essentially, a Cmd+C, Cmd+V job on a markdown template. This isn't innovation; it's an expense report waiting to happen.

They talk about "iterating to perfection." I have a different term for that: unbillable engineering hours. Let’s do some quick, back-of-the-napkin math. They say it only takes a "couple tweaks" to get the workflow right. I've seen engineering projects. A "couple tweaks" means two senior developers arguing about prompt syntax for a week. Let’s be generous and call it 10 hours of developer time. At a modest blended rate of $150/hour, that’s $1,500 just to teach a robot how to write a short note about a webhook. A task that would take a Product Manager, who we are already paying, about seven minutes.

But that’s just the appetizer. The main course in this banquet of bad decisions is the Total Cost of Ownership.

• The Software: What does this Cursor thing cost? The price isn't conveniently listed here, which is my first red flag. Vendor websites that hide the price are like restaurants without a menu—you just know you’re about to be fleeced. Let's pencil in, say, $40 per user per month. For a team of 50 developers? That's $24,000 a year.
• The "LLM": They casually mention the command "guides the LLM." Which one? Are we paying per-token API fees to OpenAI? To Google? Who gets the receipt when the AI decides to write War and Peace instead of a simple feature update? That’s a blank check I am not signing.
• The Inevitable Consultant: The blog post itself is a litany of highly specific, brittle rules.

  • Filename: kebab-case-title.md
  • Human tone: Informal, not corporate-sounding
  • Avoid "programmatically": Do not use this word

What happens in six months when the LLM updates and forgets it’s not supposed to sound "corporate"? Or it suddenly develops a passion for "programmatically"? We won't have the time to fix it, so we'll hire a "Cursor Workflow Optimization Guru" at $400/hour to spend a week "re-aligning our AI synergies." That’s another $16,000.

So, let's tally the "true" first-year cost of automating this monumental task:

• $1,500 (Setup & "Tweaking")
• $24,000 (Imaginary-but-likely-underestimated Cursor subscription)
• $5,000 (A conservative buffer for LLM API calls)
• $16,000 (The "Guru" we'll need when this inevitably breaks)

That brings our grand total to $46,500 to solve a problem that costs us, maybe, $500 a year in combined employee minutes. The ROI on this isn't just negative; it's a financial black hole. They’ve turned a simple markdown file into a recurring, multi-vendor dependency nightmare. It’s vendor lock-in disguised as a productivity hack. And for what? So a developer can type /changelog in Slack instead of opening a text file? The process still ends with a human reviewing the pull request anyway! We haven't saved a step; we've just made the steps in between more expensive and opaque.

I’m sure their board is very proud of this "shortcut." Meanwhile, I’ll be over here with my trusty calculator, funding projects that actually generate revenue instead of finding ever-more-complex ways to write a status update.

This has been an enlightening read, truly. It’s a perfect case study in what not to do. I'll be sure to file it away in my "Reasons We Use Google Docs and a Simple Checklist" folder. And with that, I cheerfully promise to never read this blog again.