4 ms·

Turns out "its just an experiment, you all are overreacting" was just a lie to damp criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycomb

by tkel 5mo ago

Turns out "its just an experiment, you all are overreacting" was just a lie to damp criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

impulser_ 5mo ago
"We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely."
- jen20 5mo ago
  People conflate “high chance of X” with “X will happen” all the time. See elections, for example.
  - ajyoon 5mo ago
    The phrasing strongly implies that they are taking the migration seriously and carefully. Merging straight to canary after 9 days is insane.
  - 0x457 5mo ago
    I have a friend who get super mad when he fails ">80% chance of success" throws. This isn't case of this tho. Even he said that there is a high chance of RIIR, 9 days still insanely short time for such rewrite if you're planning to have some sort of community around the project.
  - wiseowise 5mo ago
    We all have eyes, it doesn't take a genius to spot a lie.
franciscop 5mo ago
It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? I do hope they release it under 2.x though, cannot imagine how a 1M LoC can break in so many ways, especially if what xiphias says is true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132902
- latexr 5mo ago
  > It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? There’s no way they can know that for sure. A change of this magnitude cannot go from experiment to success in such a short time frame. Even if all the code were 100% correct, you can’t call it a success until it’s battle tested in real world scenarios for a while, and that is impossible without time. Same way you can’t cook properly by throwing food into a vulcano. It’s not just about the temperature. Either the “experiment” claim was a lie or they are being irresponsible.
- camel-cdr 5mo ago
  If I got magically handed the perfect rust rewrite for a project of this magnitude, it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good.
  - overfeed 5mo ago
    > it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good What if another (unstated) goal of your rewrite was to provide marketing material for how advanced your acquirers AI tools are? The faster the turnaround, the better they (and therefore you) look.
worble 5mo ago
Merging a complete rewrite in another language in 9 days seems insane to me. Maybe I'm just too cautious but with something like this I'd split off as a separate binary and get some heavy use customers involved as testers first to see if it causes any unforeseen problems before slowly expanding it out. I'd want to be pretty damn confident it won't cause any regressions before sunsetting the original codebase in favor of this one.
- progbits 5mo ago
  > too cautious No, you are perfectly normal. The people who in one week decided to replace the whole codebase for a widely used tool with code no human has seen are the crazy ones.
- goyozi 5mo ago
  I don’t think you’re too cautious. Big upgrades and rewrites is somewhat of a „work hobby” of mine and this seems waaay too fast. I don’t know how the Bun canary process works and I guess their test suite is better than typical projects but still… I can’t imagine this working out well without testing it on a variety of big projects for a significant amount of time. There’s probably loads(?) of observable behaviors that people rely on, consciously or not. Even _if_ the new thing is 100% spec compliant, it might still be breaking or otherwise problematic for heavy users. That said, I’d love to be proven wrong. I use Bun from time to time on small stuff and I enjoy it, so I wish them well (:
- borngraced 5mo ago
  Testing in production xD
- progx 5mo ago
  9 days is the official story. Nobody knows, how long they really work on.
randypewick 5mo ago
The experiment might have turned out well, or the author might have spent enough time to bring it to a place they was comfortable. Frustration moves mountains, I don't think this rewrite was done lightly.
- ajyoon 5mo ago
  The rewrite was obviously done lightly.
keyle 5mo ago
I'm no believer... 9 days later... Lessssssgoooooooo wooooooooo <sunglasses and rave>
mapcars 5mo ago
Well it was 9 days ago, at the time they were not confident, but maybe the results were insanely good.
- rk06 5mo ago
  no matter how good the results are, this kind of rewrites deserves an experimental build to be battle tested by bleeding edge users. It takes a lot of rigorous testing automated and manual and by community before such changes are cosnidered permanent. One does not simply YOLO a full langugae rewrite without user feedback. it is insane.
  - Tadpole9181 5mo ago
    You should really read TFA because... that's exactly what they're doing? The Zig version has not been removed and this only exists got canary builds. No rust binaries are being distributed as stable.
    - rk06 5mo ago
      The page is not loading for me.
    - 12_throw_away 5mo ago
      But the official canary/bleeding edge/nightly/whatever version is now the LLM rewrite, yes?
  - mapcars 5mo ago
    >One does not simply YOLO a full langugae rewrite without user feedback. it is insane. The whole ai thing today is pretty insane, I would say. Why not ride with it, especially if your company is one of the biggest leaders?
tclancy 5mo ago
> was just a lie to damp criticism. Citation needed. Couldn't it just as easily have been one person being as suspicious of the task as everyone else seemed to be?
preommr 5mo ago
Well I've got egg on my face. I am in that post, defending bun. I thought for sure the peanut gallery was overreacting. Especially when the concern was absurd - because who would do such an insance thing? Like, at the time I legitimately thought 'no way a project switches over in a few months'. Even as an absurd hypothetical, I couldn't even imagine the prospect of it being done in a matter of days. Feeling really confused right now.
- ulbu 5mo ago
  that’s the advertisement part of this ordeal you’re experiencing.
- rglover 5mo ago
  > Well I've got egg on my face. Not at all. Supporting a methodical conversion to Rust seems reasonable. How could you have predicted they'd shotgun it?
skeledrew 5mo ago
Does anything from that comment say that there was 0% chance the experiment wouldn't be merged into main? I see "very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely", which just means the low chance of it not being thrown out has occurred.
- mapmeld 5mo ago
  It doesn't say what will happen, but isn't their comment responding to people who don't like the look of this rewrite, and telling them basically that they don't have to think/worry about it? I definitely read it as 'not yet' and not 'another week or so'.
pier25 5mo ago
Maybe Anthropic decided to push this because of all the attention the experiment got. If it works out it’ll be a good study case for marketing.
veidr 5mo ago
You have no idea if it was a lie or not. I routinely have my clanker fleet spend a couple days toiling on some crap that I assume I will throw away, but it turns out pretty awesome, so I keep it. It's entirely plausible that when that comment was posted, he doubted it would work well enough to keep. (Sensible default for LLM code, btw. But sometimes it works great.)
potsandpans 5mo ago
Surely the mods will be here to remind you that it's against the rules to direct personal attacks towards other community members, to fulminate and brigade. Or do those protections only cover whiny open source developers upset about a chat bot writing blogs?
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

by tkel 5mo ago

Turns out "its just an experiment, you all are overreacting" was just a lie to damp criticism. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226

impulser_ 5mo ago

"We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely."

jen20 5mo ago
People conflate “high chance of X” with “X will happen” all the time. See elections, for example.
- ajyoon 5mo ago
  The phrasing strongly implies that they are taking the migration seriously and carefully. Merging straight to canary after 9 days is insane.
- 0x457 5mo ago
  I have a friend who get super mad when he fails ">80% chance of success" throws. This isn't case of this tho. Even he said that there is a high chance of RIIR, 9 days still insanely short time for such rewrite if you're planning to have some sort of community around the project.
- wiseowise 5mo ago
  We all have eyes, it doesn't take a genius to spot a lie.

franciscop 5mo ago

It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? I do hope they release it under 2.x though, cannot imagine how a 1M LoC can break in so many ways, especially if what xiphias says is true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48132902

latexr 5mo ago
> It seems it was an experiment at that moment, and that it went well? There’s no way they can know that for sure. A change of this magnitude cannot go from experiment to success in such a short time frame. Even if all the code were 100% correct, you can’t call it a success until it’s battle tested in real world scenarios for a while, and that is impossible without time. Same way you can’t cook properly by throwing food into a vulcano. It’s not just about the temperature. Either the “experiment” claim was a lie or they are being irresponsible.
camel-cdr 5mo ago
If I got magically handed the perfect rust rewrite for a project of this magnitude, it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good.
- overfeed 5mo ago
  > it would take way longer than 9 days to merge, because I would need to make sure it's actually good What if another (unstated) goal of your rewrite was to provide marketing material for how advanced your acquirers AI tools are? The faster the turnaround, the better they (and therefore you) look.

worble 5mo ago

Merging a complete rewrite in another language in 9 days seems insane to me. Maybe I'm just too cautious but with something like this I'd split off as a separate binary and get some heavy use customers involved as testers first to see if it causes any unforeseen problems before slowly expanding it out. I'd want to be pretty damn confident it won't cause any regressions before sunsetting the original codebase in favor of this one.

progbits 5mo ago
> too cautious No, you are perfectly normal. The people who in one week decided to replace the whole codebase for a widely used tool with code no human has seen are the crazy ones.
goyozi 5mo ago
I don’t think you’re too cautious. Big upgrades and rewrites is somewhat of a „work hobby” of mine and this seems waaay too fast. I don’t know how the Bun canary process works and I guess their test suite is better than typical projects but still… I can’t imagine this working out well without testing it on a variety of big projects for a significant amount of time. There’s probably loads(?) of observable behaviors that people rely on, consciously or not. Even _if_ the new thing is 100% spec compliant, it might still be breaking or otherwise problematic for heavy users. That said, I’d love to be proven wrong. I use Bun from time to time on small stuff and I enjoy it, so I wish them well (:
borngraced 5mo ago
Testing in production xD
progx 5mo ago
9 days is the official story. Nobody knows, how long they really work on.

randypewick 5mo ago

The experiment might have turned out well, or the author might have spent enough time to bring it to a place they was comfortable. Frustration moves mountains, I don't think this rewrite was done lightly.

ajyoon 5mo ago
The rewrite was obviously done lightly.

keyle 5mo ago

I'm no believer... 9 days later... Lessssssgoooooooo wooooooooo <sunglasses and rave>

mapcars 5mo ago

Well it was 9 days ago, at the time they were not confident, but maybe the results were insanely good.

rk06 5mo ago
no matter how good the results are, this kind of rewrites deserves an experimental build to be battle tested by bleeding edge users. It takes a lot of rigorous testing automated and manual and by community before such changes are cosnidered permanent. One does not simply YOLO a full langugae rewrite without user feedback. it is insane.
- Tadpole9181 5mo ago
  You should really read TFA because... that's exactly what they're doing? The Zig version has not been removed and this only exists got canary builds. No rust binaries are being distributed as stable.
  - rk06 5mo ago
    The page is not loading for me.
  - 12_throw_away 5mo ago
    But the official canary/bleeding edge/nightly/whatever version is now the LLM rewrite, yes?
- mapcars 5mo ago
  >One does not simply YOLO a full langugae rewrite without user feedback. it is insane. The whole ai thing today is pretty insane, I would say. Why not ride with it, especially if your company is one of the biggest leaders?

tclancy 5mo ago

> was just a lie to damp criticism. Citation needed. Couldn't it just as easily have been one person being as suspicious of the task as everyone else seemed to be?

preommr 5mo ago

Well I've got egg on my face. I am in that post, defending bun. I thought for sure the peanut gallery was overreacting. Especially when the concern was absurd - because who would do such an insance thing? Like, at the time I legitimately thought 'no way a project switches over in a few months'. Even as an absurd hypothetical, I couldn't even imagine the prospect of it being done in a matter of days. Feeling really confused right now.

ulbu 5mo ago
that’s the advertisement part of this ordeal you’re experiencing.
rglover 5mo ago
> Well I've got egg on my face. Not at all. Supporting a methodical conversion to Rust seems reasonable. How could you have predicted they'd shotgun it?

skeledrew 5mo ago

Does anything from that comment say that there was 0% chance the experiment wouldn't be merged into main? I see "very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely", which just means the low chance of it not being thrown out has occurred.

mapmeld 5mo ago
It doesn't say what will happen, but isn't their comment responding to people who don't like the look of this rewrite, and telling them basically that they don't have to think/worry about it? I definitely read it as 'not yet' and not 'another week or so'.

pier25 5mo ago

Maybe Anthropic decided to push this because of all the attention the experiment got. If it works out it’ll be a good study case for marketing.

veidr 5mo ago

You have no idea if it was a lie or not. I routinely have my clanker fleet spend a couple days toiling on some crap that I assume I will throw away, but it turns out pretty awesome, so I keep it. It's entirely plausible that when that comment was posted, he doubted it would work well enough to keep. (Sensible default for LLM code, btw. But sometimes it works great.)

potsandpans 5mo ago

Surely the mods will be here to remind you that it's against the rules to direct personal attacks towards other community members, to fulminate and brigade. Or do those protections only cover whiny open source developers upset about a chat bot writing blogs?

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]