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6 days of work to do this. Even if it doesn't end up becoming meaningful, it shows just how tokens and work done will be linked now and in the future. It's goi
by aurareturn 6mo ago
6 days of work to do this. Even if it doesn't end up becoming meaningful, it shows just how tokens and work done will be linked now and in the future.
It's going to be hard to compete with someone or a company that has more compute. They will just be able to do things you can't.
- pjmlp 6mo agoWith less employees....
- aurareturn 6mo agoIsn’t just one guy?
- Defletter 6mo agoExactly
- rvz 6mo agoThis is exactly how Anthropic will market this rewrite towards companies thinking about doing more layoffs. 1 person did a rust rewrite that took 6 days that would have taken hundreds of engineers more than a year to do.
- baq 6mo agoThe saving grace here is a rewrite of a project with a good test suite is the sweet spot: LLMs are great at translation and do great with verifiable goals. I agree it’s still mind blowing compared to before times, though.
- xienze 6mo ago> 1 person did a rust rewrite that took 6 days that would have taken hundreds of engineers more than a year to do. Even cheaper would just be to not do it in the first place. Was there a pressing need to rewrite it?
- Dylan16807 6mo ago> would have taken hundreds of engineers more than a year This is estimating what, 10 lines per day each? No way translating code is anywhere near that slow.
- Aurornis 6mo ago> 1 person did a rust rewrite that took 6 days that would have taken hundreds of engineers more than a year to do. The entire bun team was only about a dozen people and they wrote it from scratch. It would not take hundreds of engineers to port the existing codebase to another language. I think this is a cool experiment, but some of these claims are getting absurd.
- 59nadir 6mo agoIt probably wouldn't take a single person who knew what they were doing more than a year to re-implement Bun in basically anything, by hand and from scratch, i.e. not even looking at source. Writing the code for something you already understand and have built before is incredibly fast. I'm sure they'll market what you said, but it's so ridiculous that I would hope people would see through this stuff.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoThe majority of Bun was written by one guy in less than a year. In what world would a rewrite take hundreds of engineers more than a year to do? The hyperbole is getting ridiculous.
- seanclayton 6mo agoAnd he has zero idea how it works. His capacity for understanding it is tied to his wallet now.
- Kwpolska 6mo agoIt's actually tied to his employment at Anthropic.
- twoodfin 6mo agoYou could have said the same thing about steam power or electricity. And it’s not just an analogy: The magic of these things is in being universal information engines. You spend capital to build them, using well-understood, scalable techniques, plug them into electricity, and out comes value. My point is, there’s no chance of a “haves and have nots” emerging, any more than electricity turned out that way in the modern world.
- suddenlybananas 6mo ago>My point is, there’s no chance of a “haves and have nots” emerging, any more than electricity turned out that way in the modern world. Energy costs vary widely across the world and that has enormous capacity for the economies of different countries and their industrial capacity.
- Dylan16807 6mo agohttps://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e... Electricity looks pretty even. Higher in Europe but they can afford that.
- alphabeta3r56 6mo agoDue to purchasing power parity, it is actually much hhigher in poorer countries, in that they are absolutely still asking the have nots.
- Dylan16807 6mo agoWhen something is expensive specifically because a country is poor and everything is harder to buy, that expense isn't making inequality worse.
- alphabeta3r56 6mo agoI am talking about have nots at a nation scale here. At level of British empire.
- nbf_1995 6mo agoI can't help but wonder what this cost in USD assuming you paid standard rates from Anthropic. Can someone even ballpark the price?
- baq 6mo agoMuch less than what it’d costs for a team of rust engineers. This is both amazing and scary; has been for a while now.
- BearOso 6mo agoIt costs several times what it would cost a small team of engineers, even assuming you gave the engineers more time to do it. I'm guessing (wildly) this was around 0.5M USD in compute time. You do get the result quicker, though.
- alice-i-cecile 6mo agoHalf a million is pretty damn cheap for a full rewrite into Rust of a million line of code codebase.
- fg137 6mo agoBut usually companies are much more careful before even spending that half a million. (And most companies don't have that money sitting around.) They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead, and, more importantly, stick to it. Being able to afford half a million doesn't mean you do it on a whim, or just throw all of that away if things don't go well. But what do I know. I am nothing compared to our AI overlords like Anthropic.
- hamandcheese 6mo ago> They would do small PoCs, do comprehensive benchmarks and evaluations of those PoCs, and decide whether to actually go ahead Perfect, $1mil in salaries to spare the company $500k in spend :)
- Aurornis 6mo agoTranslating a project that includes a good test suite from one language to another is known to be a great case where LLMs work well. When you’re starting with a complete codebase to use as an example and a test suite to check everything it’s much easier to iterate toward the desired goal. The LLM can already see what the goals are and how they’ve been implemented once already, which is a much easier problem than starting from a spec.
- mezyt 6mo agoGreat case where rust works well too. I won't cite every famous libs that got rewritten in rust but it wasn't all with LLM.
- lionkor 6mo agoI fail to think of a successful Rust rewrite, so far what I've seen is just programmers who aren't sufficiently experienced, who decide to pick Rust and rewrite something in it, and then (this is the bad part) claim it's better for that reason only. It never is. It's always worse, because rewrites fundamentally end up with a worse product first.
- apitman 6mo agoIt's not hard to imagine a future where the only things committed to git repos are tests and specs.
- taftster 6mo ago
- qudat 6mo agoNah. These agents are getting easier and easier to run local. Have you tried Qwen 3.6 27b? It’s insane what it can do compared to its size. Like 100% vibe small projects if you manage context properly. These models are a race to the bottom just like compute.
- aurareturn 6mo agoI don’t think it matters. Local matters becoming better has not stopped demand for SOTA models.
- qudat 6mo agoMy guess is it won’t be worth it to focus specifically on coding models once local small models work just as well or within range. That will naturally close the gap even more
- sdevonoes 6mo agoUnclear. Very good products tend to be about doing one or a few things very well; not about doing tons of stuff. So far, all I see is “Man, Im a 10x engineer now!”, shipping more code but without clear direction and taste. At this point, most of LLM-based work is just noise.
- kzrdude 6mo agoIt's a new era of capital, literally, in software development. Ownership of the means of production is now concentrated.
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoThere are not many companies that live off taking full test suite made over decades and just generating code off it.