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Why so much negativity? I find these projects interesting for learning purposes and exploring new ways. What’s wrong with that?
by josefrichter 3mo ago
Why so much negativity? I find these projects interesting for learning purposes and exploring new ways. What’s wrong with that?
- bakugo 3mo agoI don't really understand how "written by AI" and "for learning purposes" can ever be compatible. What exactly does one learn from typing "Rewrite this in Rust, make no mistakes" into a terminal?
- manquer 3mo agoHow much token this would burn is of interest I suppose
- piker 3mo agoBecause it’s uncomfortable to see decades of work copied so trivially.
- nasretdinov 3mo agoI can trivially copy any code even without an LLM though with a simple tool called rsync!
- antihero 3mo agoBut that's the thing, without the decades of work, it wouldn't BE trivial. Everyone is standing on the shoulders of those which came before. If LLMs allow us to combine the incredible decades of effort and knowledge and experiences that's gone into building something as great as Postgres, and take that and combine the experience and philosophy that has led to the creation of a language that potentially provides tangible benefits, and for far less human time and effort that it would have otherwise taken...surely something that should be celebrated as absolutely incredible?
- jackphilson 3mo agoBut who is getting celebrated? The people who spent a lot of time on the original thing, or the AI rewrite that everyone now uses?
- mayli 3mo agoThe people benefit from all human knowledge, future human beings.
- waterTanuki 3mo agoif only we lived in such a world
- antihero 3mo agoI mean, all of it? Maybe someone born post rewrite will think wow AI made a cool thing but nobody is going whoa Postgres is made purely by AI?
- alirezaxdehghan 3mo agoImagine the feelings of a dude who used to code in assembly and then some punk writes in c++ and uses gcc... decades of work wasted.
- Apaec 3mo agoThat is a completely different thing than LLM generated code.
- preisschild 3mo agoThey typically respect software licenses and thus comply with the original software's wishes. LLM companies steal the original work and LLM users dont even know where the replicated code was lifted from or how it was licensed.
- groundzeros2015 3mo agoThey have the source right in front of them.
- queoahfh 3mo agoI am concerned about the quality. Even a cursory skim of the code makes the code appear asinine. Unless the genius aspects of the code elude me. https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b7df88c61b180e1cabdb2/crates/backend/catalog/pg_inherits/src/lib.rs#L450 https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b... https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b7df88c61b180e1cabdb2/crates/backend/catalog/pg_inherits/src/lib.rs#L221 https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b...
- mechazawa 3mo agoYeah same. The structure makes no real sense and when digging into the code it reads like I'm the first human to look at it.
- thewhitetulip 3mo agoThat's how Ai generated code is. I am almost convinced that Models are intentionally taught to write obtuse code because AI companies don't want us to write code at all
- 0x000xca0xfe 3mo agoI'm too young but I imagine assembly programmers were feeling the same when automatic code generation by compilers took over. Very weird.
- iigijshaba 3mo agoMore that I got confused by the C function returning bool, not as an error value, but as a result, which is my fault for skimming it quickly. I have taken a closer look at the code, and it seems superficially a somewhat faithful rewrite, not quite idiomatic Rust, but closer than I anticipated at first. I know there are non-LLM rewriting tools for C to Rust, and with a test suite to help, a rewrite to Rust might be greatly helped. The new Rust code does have some drawbacks in some ways, and there are topics I am curious about.
- u8080 3mo ago
- jillesvangurp 3mo agoPeople feel threatened by LLMs doing things well that they feel should require their skills and talent. That's understandable but it's still a bit of a negative emotion that probably isn't very productive. Or very rational. This thread is full of people trying to argue that this can't be any good, shouldn't be any good, and is clearly going to end in tears. And obviously this thing passing tens of thousands of carefully curated tests that accumulated over decades suggests otherwise. It's hard to argue against that. This probably is going to have some new issues. But it's an impressive achievement.
- LtWorf 3mo agoIrrational fear… that's why we all collectively ditched gcc and moved to that llm rewrite made in rust right? The only one using feelings rather than reason here is you.
- hexo 3mo agoI can't see the achievement here.
- jillesvangurp 3mo ago100% of the tests passing, on track to be faster and more scalable. That's not a trivial achievement.
- byzantinegene 3mo agocan you enlighten me, what exactly do you learn from asking a llm to do a rewrite?
- josefrichter 3mo agoNo, I can’t. The way you frame your question tells me you’re not seeking enlightenment.
- solid_fuel 3mo agoIt's a very fair and generous way to frame the question, considering you like seeing these rewrites for "learning".
- subarctic 3mo agoI mean you can learn a lot. You can learn what's possible with less effort to build a proof of concept. It's kind of like you had another engineer do it for you, you don't completely learn how to do it yourself but you can still learn a lot with much less effort
- mahogany 3mo agoYou would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?
- hexo 3mo agoexactly zero knowledge gained. all former expert understanding is buried down in slop so it is inaccessible and will be completely inaccessible once slop-machine stops
- subarctic 3mo agoYou learn that you can build a version of Postgres that passes the tests and improves on these benchmarks in rust. You gain access to a codebase that does it which you can learn a lot from too. Definitely not zero like someone else said
- esjeon 3mo agoPossibly: 1. Piggybacking established brand names (Postgres + Rust) 2. … without practicality nor advancement (e.g. this solves no extra problems) 3. … without trust (i.e. LLM-driven rewrite, with no capabilities to thoroughly review it) I think people get easily upset when the title has high-signal names like Postgres, and the title touts it somehow, yet it’s obviously impractical for obvious reasons (short-/long-term practicality, social trust & network effect, etc)
- kvuj 3mo agoYeah, if the title was : Vibe coded SQL engine written in rust, I don't think much anger would be found in the comments. But then its credibility would be abysmally low, which makes it undesirable for the authors.
- nodoodles 3mo agoAgreed, the negativity here is quite wild. There are new power tools for our craft. People are experimenting and having fun with said power tools, and have interesting results that may be transferrable to $YOUR_PROJECT. Doing things just because we can is a great reason for hacking around. Kudos for the author for answering questions and keeping up resilience - HN crowd is not what it used to be (shakes fist at a different cloud).
- fg137 3mo agoBecause it's a waste of token. I'd love to be proven wrong, but chances are that nobody will use this in production, people will completely forget about the project in 6 months, and the project will be archived not long after that. This is not the first one of similar projects.