AWS Is Not Simpler. Agents Just Got Better at Reading It.

I optimized my architecture for the wrong model.

I used to think black-box infrastructure was the right abstraction for AI-driven development.

Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare Workers — a sharp contract in front, a managed backend behind — felt like the obvious fit. The less an agent had to reason about, the fewer places it could get lost. Give it a clean interface, hide the messy backend, move fast.

I still think that was right for the agents we had last year. I don't think it's right for the agents we're starting to use now.

The shift is not that AWS got simpler. It didn't. Setup still takes longer, CI/CD takes more work to wire, and cost control has real limits. The shift is that agents got better at reading complexity — and once an agent can actually use a large structured context, the things I treated as overhead (resources, provider schemas, IAM policies, explicit queues, explicit alarms, explicit networks) become the highest-signal context I can hand it.