15 ms·

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

• LAC-Tech 3mo ago
  Agreed. The outrage around what Andrew said was performative and melodramatic. I remember the "no work-life balance if you work here" thing, and then I remember Bun's CEO last year complaining he might not be able to get H1Bs anymore... And this whole thing reeked of a publicity stunt. Show people you can use $$$ of tokens to vibe code a refactor. The headline is how great anthropic - bun's owner - is.
• vlaaad 3mo ago
  Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
  • manojlds 3mo ago
    Yeah and Bun and Zig are not competing in anyway as well. Zig blog post has been updated as well recently btw.
  • aaa_aaa 3mo ago
    Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.
    • wowoc 3mo ago
      I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.
      • matsemann 3mo ago
        It's said to imply they have no bias. But someone using Codex or AI agents heavily already have a bias here, just to be clear. Because the discussion isn't just about bun/anthropic/zig/rust, but also between AIs role in coding. So them touting their use of Codex, while not Claude, can still be a bias, especially in the direction they're trying to absolve themselves from.
    • raincole 3mo ago
      It reads as "I don't use Claude Code."
    • coldtea 3mo ago
      Meant to imply he's not a Claude fanboi.
    • drd0rk 3mo ago
      I'm using Arch Linux btw
  • vanderZwan 3mo ago
    > Anthropic is not in the programming language market Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.
  • raincole 3mo ago
    Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • lemming 3mo ago
        ...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
        • embedding-shape 3mo ago
          [flagged]
          • JuniperMesos 3mo ago
            [dead]
          • self_awareness 3mo ago
            And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works? Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
          • 3mo ago
  • lelanthran 3mo ago
    > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.
    • eru 3mo ago
      Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.
      • embedding-shape 3mo ago
        > Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. I mean, they did buy a JS runtime, so surely they must care more about JavaScript and TypeScript than other languages, right? Otherwise that move makes 0 sense. Maybe this part from their marketing post about the acquisition is just a straight up lie I suppose? > Together, we’ll keep making Bun the best JavaScript runtime for all developers [...]
      • lelanthran 3mo ago
        > Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun. The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from. Zig -> Rust : "We had all these memory errors" Rust -> Zig : "We had poor iteration due to compile times" Java -> Anything : "Memory is at a premium when we're trying to run a fleet of agents" Anything -> JS : "We wanted a single language to optimise our agents for" You get the idea.
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
  • bel8 3mo ago
    Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes. Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite. Andrew's post in response was anything but that.
    • embedding-shape 3mo ago
      I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post. If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.
      • Anon1096 3mo ago
        Your post seems pretty polite. Did you have Claude write it for you?
        • embedding-shape 3mo ago
          That'd have been fun, wouldn't it? No, I'm too lazy for that, HN gets my raw and unfiltered disgustingly human thoughts and feelings, unfortunately for all of you. For shits and giggles, I asked Sol xhigh what it thought about my previous comment, giving it a "6.5/10 for politeness", saying "it’s polite in tone, but somewhat provocative and reductive in substance.". Maybe this filter should also include provocativeness and reductiveness, and if it isn't provocative and reductive enough, surely it's a LLM? ;)
          • postalrat 3mo ago
            To be useful the filter should give a positive on content I personally disprove of.
    • 3mo ago
  • audunw 3mo ago
    The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite. The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzzer that the Zig team suggested they use, not just the high level fuzzing they were doing) For this kind of project I do think using Rust is a good idea. At the very least because a project like Bun probably can benefit from a more mature language. But I also think Andrew’s perspective of this process has been essential to understand what happened here, and though he could have been nicer with his word selection in a couple of places (he doesn’t have the clout of Linus Torvalds to get away with it), what he wrote absolutely needed to be said. I find it annoying that people dismiss it as personal attacks. If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. It’s essential context for understanding what happened.
    • ModernMech 3mo ago
      > If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.
      • flumpcakes 3mo ago
        It doesn't need to expose something as new to point out a causal link? Someone saying that work-life balance means all work and no life, and then producing substandard quality at said work seems worth pointing out. A trillion dollar company vibe-porting a vibe-coded low quality product for clout/advertisement seems worth a call-out.
        • ModernMech 3mo ago
          No causal link was demonstrated, only gossip. Maybe if evidence was provided you could say that, but that’s not what happened.
  • pizza234 3mo ago
    > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company. Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). The implication is that Anthropic has a stake in Rust's success. Also, to be kept in mind that devs advertising successfull rewrites often hide some aspects that are unfavorable to the narrative; typically, how bad was the code before the rewrite), although there are other (significant) aspects that have been omitted. > Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article (here: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...). Summary: - Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards - Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation) - When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig - The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity This is summarized at the end of the post: > Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator. Such people might reasonably worry that might happen to them As a matter of fact, I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This is undeserved though, and that's what Kelley explains. There's definitely a personal attack somewhat, and this is addressed in the last (added later) section.
    • preommr 3mo ago
      > I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This doesn't even make any sense. The part that you're quoting[0], is Andrew commenting on the fallout from the blog post he made. How could you have thought something about a blog post that hadn't come out yet? Also, if you are talkinga bout the post Jarred made, it was extremely charitable about zig: "Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig." [0] "The other critical mistake I made with this post was failing to consider the rather obvious and important point that this might affect Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator."
  • lelanthran 3mo ago
    > Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. Not sure; it has some elements of personal issues, but they're followed by a rationale from the author. Honestly, seeing the project lead (Andrew Kelly) take a stand against poor engineering practices without any equivocation makes me more inclined to want to use Zig - their values (in this regard, at least) align with mine. He also substantiates what many of us are saying to all these "Very Senior Chief Engineer with 40 years experience" who are boasting of 10x productivity: these people aren't reading the code they are generating, and were producing slop even without AI.
  • shevy-java 3mo ago
    You mean Anthropic has no agenda on its own? That seems a very biased analysis here. The response by Zig could be flawed (speculation, I have not reached this conclusion yet) but I don't see how this offsets Anthropic wanting to promote its AI slop here in any way, shape or form.
  • athrowaway3z 3mo ago
    I'm a heavy Rust user who doesn't like Zig all that much. I browsed through the Bun code following Kelly's post, and decided to have Codex replace all my Bun usage with Deno.
    • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
      Care to given an example of the egregious code that led to such a drastic personal shift?
    • postepowanieadm 3mo ago
      Did you use any specific tools, like ast-grep, or did it manual way?
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • whizzter 3mo ago
    It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while. Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust). The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs). The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms. If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle. Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell. And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem. I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions. I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.
    • Zecc 3mo ago
      That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you. Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.
      • whizzter 3mo ago
        Ice skates with a rocket engine on your back?
  • simondotau 3mo ago
    Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic's posts were sanctimonious, self-serving, tone-concealed delegitimisation of Zig. Kelly's post was a strategically poor but sincere individual understandably frustrated at this concealed attack, expressing his honest feelings about the situation.
  • torginus 3mo ago
    Andrew Kelley mentioned that the rewrite did bring technical improvements, however those were not tied to Rust and could've been made in the Zig codebase.
  • Thanemate 3mo ago
    The moment technical decisions are influenced by LLM compatibility and LLM performance, they basically are. Remember the days where teams would adopt technologies based on how familiar the members are with them? "Now that the AI is here" and is the one writing code, to the point where Linkedin devs flex how it's been months since they touched source code, teams adopt technologies based on how familiar AI is with them.
  • afavour 3mo ago
    > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; Did we just read the same blog post? I see no assertion in it that Anthropic is in the programming language market, rather that this rewrite was a marketing opportunity for them they were happy to lean into. > For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines. The latter part of the post is much less about Anthropic and more about AI coding in general so I’d say it’s still very relevant to your interests.
  • nozzlegear 3mo ago
    > Anthropic is not in the programming language market; The article by Ray Myers makes the case that Anthropic is in the programming language market by way of them having a clear monetary stake in making their agents look supremely capable of all tasks, up to and including rewriting an entire Zig codebase to Rust. From TFA: > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering. They need you to believe they can do that. Well, maybe it’s not you that they need to convince. Maybe it’s your C-Suite, various world leaders, or the manager of your retirement fund. They’ve raised $132 billion in investment, and are approaching an IPO valued over $1 trillion. Since they cannot show profitability, this depends on selling their hypothetical future impact. > In literary terms, Anthropic is an unreliable narrator. > One of their key narratives is: Coding is going away, then the rest of software engineering, and eventually most other human labor. This kind of money behind this kind of story has an impact, regardless of how true we think the story is.
• runtime_lens 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• embedding-shape 3mo ago
  > Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.
  • dcre 3mo ago
    I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.
    • sufficientsoup 3mo ago
      Why take what he said at face value after "Calm down; this is just an experiment... but actually I'm gonna merge this huge thing in a week"?
      • noisy_boy 3mo ago
        Seems like if the experiment didn't work, nothing to lose. But it did and he capitalized it in the most in-your-face possible. it would be interesting to line up the timelines of the Rust experiment vs him joining Anthropic.
    • shimman 3mo ago
      Devs need to start realize how people in power take advantage of them. If you already have a bright starry-eyed Peter Thiel acolyte, it's not hard to see how they can be taken advantage of. Especially when it's a multibillion dollar company that stands to give you literally multigenerational defining amount of wealth. They hired them because they already agreed with them. Reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote during an interview: > Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?” > Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
• deleted 3mo ago
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• jonplackett 3mo ago
  The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy? We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago? How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt? LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new humans who know how to do it.
  • piokoch 3mo ago
    Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff. People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month. Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff. So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone. We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.
    • jonplackett 3mo ago
      If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway) And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now. I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs. Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.
• self_awareness 3mo ago
  Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself. The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C? C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on. Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course). So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
  • lelanthran 3mo ago
    > The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. > In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code. Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees. If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns. IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class of errors". This means that while Rust prevents specific bugs, as a side-effect it will also prevent some correct code.
    • deleted 3mo ago
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    • self_awareness 3mo ago
      Very true. Rust prevents some good code as well. Also it doesn't guarantee that the code is always 100% correct. But I think this is the correct direction of programming language evolution.
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • prollings 3mo ago
    Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me. The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.
• throwa356262 3mo ago
  I think Anthropic is putting too much time and energy into marketing (and politics) while competitors are catching up on the engineering side. But what do I know, maybe your CTO bought this and now wants to fire half of the dev team and use Claude to convert your COBOL codebase to Rust...
• simjnd 3mo ago
  Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post. Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.
  • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
    >very actual technical substance Did we read the same article? I mean it wasn't talking about a specific line of code, but it had deep architecture details, rational for memory safety and bugs, agentic coding patterns for scale. It was full of substance, multiple times.
    • simjnd 3mo ago
      I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect". Why was it in their own words a real option? And why did they not go for it? This is the technical substance I'm looking for: an engineer explaining what options have been considered and what wanted and unwanted tradeoffs they present. Also only mentioning figures for the platforms that saw an improvement is sketchy. "With ICU and code folding Windows and Linux get 20% smaller", what about macOS? Why did it not see the same gains? The fact that they don't mention it makes me think that they don't KNOW, and isn't confidence inspiring coming from the engineer who SHOULD know.
      • cognitiveinline 3mo ago
        Every blog post has infinite things it does not mention. "Technical substance" simply requires that some technically substantive things are mentioned. Which was indeed the case.
• sajithdilshan 3mo ago
  I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?
  • coldtea 3mo ago
    > but do people blindly trust them Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.
    • sajithdilshan 3mo ago
      Then that's their own fault. Nothing to do with Anthropic, it could have been any other company putting out marketing material and people blindly trust them.
      • latexr 3mo ago
        I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make. Yes, “it could have been any other company”, but it wasn’t, it was this one. Had it been any other company, we’d be talking about that other company; because it was this one, we’re talking about this one.
        • sajithdilshan 3mo ago
          My point is that the article starts with > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering But that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly. Why not just call it a bluff and move on rather than making a mountain out of molehill
          • deleted 3mo ago
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          • coldtea 3mo ago
• virajk_31 3mo ago
  Anthropic migrated Bun from Zig to Rust, they probably tried writing it in Zig using AI and ran into issues because there isn't enough Zig training data. A year ago, most LLMs couldn' t code reliably in Rust, But were fluent in Python, C, and web tech.
  • sublinear 3mo ago
    Nobody and nothing is fluent is "web tech"!
    • virajk_31 3mo ago
      web tech - HTML, CSS, JS, and based/derived frameworks
      • sublinear 3mo ago
        Yes, but your reply has now also recharacterized my original comment. I wasn't being pedantic. I was saying that LLMs even worse at writing for the web than humans, and humans are pretty bad! I'm saying this as a web developer.
        • virajk_31 3mo ago
          oh, it is subjective and depends on use cases, for most of my use cases in web dev , it did work really good
        • llm_nerd 3mo ago
          >I'm saying this as a web developer. Do you think this gives your claim extra merit? You understand it does the opposite, right? What it actually achieves is that it makes you look like you're raging against the dying of the light, in utter and complete futility. Yes, LLMs are especially good at the web stack, given that training data is overwhelmed with enormous volumes of such data. It is the one realm that has been completely obsoleted by modern AI, while a few other realms at least have some resistance.
• nelox 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• ashishb 3mo ago
  Languages do matter. And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases. In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.
  • coldtea 3mo ago
    Keeping it to the most mainstream, Java is a mighty fine choice as well, with even better options for third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry than most of the above.
    • ashishb 3mo ago
      I think most organizations don't want to increase their Java usage. And the reason is not technical. Technically, it is a great language. Legally, it feels risky to most.
      • coldtea 3mo ago
        I think that's absolute wrong. The situation with Java is absolutely clear.
        • deleted 3mo ago
          [deleted]
  • bel8 3mo ago
    I think Odin's batteries included approach have a chance to achieve escape velocity. Specially if their community and their BDFL continues to be welcoming and fun to interact with. Their 1.0 roadmap announcement is cool: https://youtu.be/dLPAqXi9In0 https://youtu.be/dLPAqXi9In0 Here's most of the language in a single demo file: https://odin-lang.org/docs/demo/ https://odin-lang.org/docs/demo/
  • well_ackshually 3mo ago
    Forgetting the JVM when it provides absurdly good performance and more packages than pretty much all three of these languages combined is certainly a choice. Even Java and all its verbosity gets fixed by not having to write it manually. Kotlin is also a very viable option. Scala if you're a bit crazy.
• khalic 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest
  • coldtea 3mo ago
    Wat? Anthropic leadership, including CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Boris Cherny, has declared that software engineering is dead or will become obsolete within 6 to 12 months due to AI automation. Cherny states that at Anthropic, no code is manually written anymore, with engineers using Claude Code to generate 22–27 pull requests daily and AI agents operating in autonomous loops. https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackboxAI_/comments/1qxhqry/anthropic_ceo_software_engineering_will_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackboxAI_/comments/1qxhqry/anthro...
  • Laurel1234 3mo ago
    What do you mean? It's literally been a significant part of their marketing.
    • khalic 3mo ago
      Let’s assume their marketing argument is in good faith (it isn’t, they’re just capturing market knowing very well they won’t replace most software dev): Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. They make it more efficient, which could lead to less software developer. How is this “campaigning to end software engineering”? It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst
      • pydry 3mo ago
        >Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthropic-ceo/ https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthro...
        • brabel 3mo ago
          This article explains what they mean by end of software engineering: > his engineering teams rarely write code from scratch anymore. The role has shifted from creation to orchestration. Engineers now operate as “conductors”—defining high-level problems, prompting AI systems to generate implementations, then reviewing and integrating outputs. Well I have been working like that as well but sure as hell I still consider that to be software engineering. You won’t get anywhere if you try doing this without being a software engineer. At least not very far, see how far purely vibe coded applications can get.
• brainless 3mo ago
  "Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering" - good but are they the only ones? I do not like Anthropic after their recent locking mechanisms. I use opencode with GLM, Mimo, Qwen, and what not. I use Codex as well. Anthropic does not need to tell me that much of software engineering is being re-written. In my opinion, the costs have crashed. I build commercial projects at 1/3rd my earlier costs. I started build everything I can in Rust and I am still doing that. My projects have only gotten more ambitious, latest being https://github.com/brainless/akar https://github.com/brainless/akar - a WIP, please don't scream at me. Many folks have publicly said they want to keep AI agents away from their works. Good for them. I want to accelerate software engineering, something I have done passionately for 20 years, with all the agents I can use. And I make my own agents, constantly experimenting to push local llm based agents. If engineers want to stay behind, good for them. Not everyone does. Andrew Kelly's post read like an attack, IMHO. But why care about me? I am just a farmer (https://www.instagram.com/curryhostel https://www.instagram.com/curryhostel) who uses AI to now build ambitious software.
  • etdznots 3mo ago
    I’m puzzled by how many people seem to be convinced (deluded?) into believing that their productivity has been multiplied and costs have become fractional to build things, why don’t I see any of that productivity gain or cost reduction out in the world? What has become cheaper or better engineered? If you believe posts like thsi, we should be living in a golden age of prosperity, when it seems that aside from getting better lots of products and companies seem to just be getting worse? Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?
    • brainless 3mo ago
      A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself. But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignoring what indies are saying.
• My_Name 3mo ago
  I think I got all the information I need to be able to judge that article from seeing that the author calls themselves a "Retrofuturist Software Mender".
  • LtWorf 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • My_Name 3mo ago
      Not sure what you mean, I have one account. Did someone else express this opinion?
      • LtWorf 3mo ago
        What opinion? Ad-personam attacks against the author and not the actual content of the link?
• woodruffw 3mo ago
  I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • etdznots 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    • poly2it 3mo ago
      Slander? Are you serious? > We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun. https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
    • woodruffw 3mo ago
      It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig. I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.
      • embedding-shape 3mo ago
        Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't? I knew it was gonna happen at one point, guess I didn't believe it'd happen so soon, but I still can't believe that nowadays people make choices about what programming language to used based on what semi-celebrity they like the most, and it's all about emotional arguments. What happened and since when is this the way people make technical choices? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe.
• alloysmila 3mo ago
  I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved. https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/ https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/
  • lelanthran 3mo ago
    > I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved. Another point of view is that, if AI wasn't available, pre-port Bun wouldn't have been such a total mess that even Fable couldn't unfuck it. IOW, the Bun codebase was being vibed well before the port; if AI was not available, would Bun have been in such a poor state that a rewrite was even necessary?
  • khalic 3mo ago
    The AI panic has infiltrated the space now, and it’s just as bad as the AI hype. Half formed ideas, emotional posts with personal attacks and arrogant language, exaggerated claims, posturing, etc. In the meantime, most of us are just using whatever tools are at our disposal and minding our own business.
• netdur 3mo ago
  very narrow vision, openai and anthropic realized what they have probably won’t lead to agi so they moved the goalposts to replacing jobs, programming just happened to be the easiest field because engineers are technical, willing to pay, and the input/output is relatively easy to measure, even that has problems though, a lot of managers are noticing that code generation is fast but actual production output doesn’t improve at the same rate, anthropic basically bootstrapped itself on coding and now they’re looking for higher paying fields that put less pressure on their servers
• sublinear 3mo ago
  So much drama between all these completely irrelevant actors circling the drain. Anthropic have lost their minds, and eventually a metric shit ton of money. Meanwhile, nobody uses Bun or Zig either. Rust continues to chug along very very slowly.
• mdavid626 3mo ago
  Anyone still be able to trust Bun? It looks like piece of garbage to me. Doesn’t even offer much compared to node or deno.
  • bel8 3mo ago
    Rust Bun has been running Claude for some time now. I'd be inclined to trust production code in such a large usebase.
• finnthehuman 3mo ago
  > The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud. It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.
• cropcirclbureau 3mo ago
  I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered. Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.
  • well_ackshually 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  • laserbeam 3mo ago
    > But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.
    • stingraycharles 3mo ago
      I also don’t really like his closing section, it has a big “sorry but not sorry” feeling to it.
      • rafterydj 3mo ago
        I read that as him beginning the healing stages. Acknowledging his flaws as soon as he could even if he couldn't change what he already said - because that post did blow up, if he had taken the whole thing down it may have just exacerbated things.
• Kiro 3mo ago
  I really don't understand what Andrew Kelly hopes to achieve here. Even the non-programmers at r/programming who usually piles on any type of anti-AI posts called it out. I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.
  • randusername 3mo ago
    TFA has an odd perspective. > Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative. [0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht... [1]: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/ https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/ [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ
• shevy-java 3mo ago
  To me it seems as if the AI corporations declared war on software engineers in general. I understand that many software engineers have already been addicted to e. g. claude (look at github, you see tons of "co-authored" rubbishness here) but to me it is clear that the AI corporations also work against the humans here - this example of the creator of the zig language (which I don't use myself, as I dislike several design choices made) being harassed by Anthropic shows this clearly as well.
• bubblegumcrisis 3mo ago
  When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.
  • entrope 3mo ago
    Probably just you. I use them somewhat frequently to make it clear where a set breaks down into alternatives or parallel factors. If there's a preface and trailer around a list of complex items, I think writing the list in one paragraph is often ambiguous and hard to follow. Using a bullet list within that kind of paragraph (IMO) makes it easier to follow what I think is important.
  • Ampersander 3mo ago
    Well, yeah, most social media posts that contain a list or a table these days are ai slop.
• samuell 3mo ago
  > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering While this may be slightly overstated, my take on this is that AI progress should have us upgrade our view of the human brain rather than the opposite. Wrote about it the other day: https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgrade-our-view https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• skor 3mo ago
  hey, does anyone remember when Slack wanted to replace email?
• jdw64 3mo ago
  [dead]
• RetroTechie 3mo ago
  There's so much good stuff in this post. Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why? Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Battle-tested, mature code > fresh rewrite. Existing Zig codebase has seen X amount of battle-testing. Rust rewrite: 0 (except -I'm assuming- passing test suites). Also: "this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk" How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this? To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok. Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.
  • herrkanin 3mo ago
    > How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with? In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.
    • cyber_kinetist 3mo ago
      > clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)
      • baokaola 3mo ago
        There's only one language that's more dangerous than C and that is unsafe Rust. I say that only half-jokingly.
• JuniperMesos 3mo ago
  > From my perspective, Anthropic is the party we need to hold accountable here. It's insane that Ray Myers thinks that Anthropic did anything related to this port that requires holding them accountable; the fact that he used those words makes me want to prevent him from having any influence over AI policy.
  • LtWorf 3mo ago
    Funding and owning something makes you accountable yes, that's how it works normally.
    • nicce 3mo ago
      Also pushing it for marketing purposes and giving free preview to Fable might contribute something.
    • TripolitianFish 3mo ago
      Inconceivable
    • slopinthebag 3mo ago
      For what, rewriting an open source project in a new language? It’s insane that in 2026 this is seen as controversial.
      • LtWorf 3mo ago
        No, for repeatedly using such low quality rewrites as marketing for your upcoming IPO, to convince people to evaluate your company more. It's insane that in 2026 we are still falling for these tricks really.
        • JuniperMesos 3mo ago
          Why shouldn't people evaluate Anthropic more after seeing this technical achievement using their software product? Seriously, let's say that every single instance of people using Anthropic LLMs to translate code in an open-source software project from one language to another was deliberately orchestrated by Anthropic's marketing department, with the aim of increasing their stock price at IPO. Even if this were true, why specifically would that be bad? Why would that be some kind of offense that Anthropic as a company committed, that they would need to be held accountable for? If you think that Anthropic's stock price will be overvalued at its IPO because too many other investors are looking at uses of Anthropic LLMs to translate code in this way, drawing a flawed conclusion from them, and then using that flawed conclusion to bid up the price of Anthropic stock, then you can trade against them in the market. Short Anthropic's stock. If you're not sure enough about this thesis to actually make this trade, then why should anyone take you seriously when you claim that this is some kind of "trick" on Anthropic's part?
• scotty79 3mo ago
  > The Bun code is a mess because of their engineering decisions, including overusing AI agents to write and review everything. Life would be paradise if people were just good for each other. They are not though. So you need a system for that case. Rust is a system that fits the modern real world software development dynamics than Zig.
• mtlynch 3mo ago
  One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong. I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]: > the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me. Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]: > Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite? Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months. The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921 [2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421 https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421 [3] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469 https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469 [4] https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067 https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067
  • mi_lk 3mo ago
    > The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything If you read the post again this sentence is not removed and Sumner did not refute that
    • mtlynch 3mo ago
• piker 3mo ago
  Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds. If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).
  • kawogi 3mo ago
    IIUC that was meant as an intermediate step (which isn't uncommon), which IMO makes the translation way less exciting. The interesting part will be whether they can transform that "mechanical Rust" into something idiomatic. I'm waiting ...
    • piker 3mo ago
      Fair, but that's also kinda like saying "we translated it to ASM as an intermediate step to C". The hard (and valuable) part is safe rust. If unsafe is everywhere, there will be abstractions that simply have to be reengineered to use safe rust. Maybe it's a way to hit the "finish line" quick in terms of using Rust but a pure unsafe translation seems almost as far away as the original Zig project.
  • bigcityslider 3mo ago
    Unsafe Rust makes me think they did this entirely because LLMs are better at Rust than at Zig, but let's see what happens next.
  • fnands 3mo ago
    Not a lot of it is unsafe, I think they said 4%? It's practically impossible to write safe Rust when you are calling external libs written in C/C++, like they do for the Javascript engine.
    • piker 3mo ago
      Sure, but you cordon that stuff off into small, bounded unsafe surfaces. My bet is the new bun is a crashy pile of garbage if they've just translated Zig spaghetti into Rust unsafe spaghetti with an LLM. Hadn't occurred to me. 4% is a lot in my world.
• jeswin 3mo ago
  Anything that can be written in Rust will be written in Rust. I'm using Rust as a placeholder for a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics. It may not be a good thing, but there's no way around it.
  • karahime 3mo ago
    If we expand the placeholder, I think "Anything that can be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics will be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics" is a desirable state of affairs.
• baq 3mo ago
  This post is ultimately complaining about a build step consisting of an automatic translation from technically irrelevant language A to technically slightly less, but still substantially irrelevant language B. I don't care what Anthropic says and what the CEOs buy, I care about my own output and the recent models give me 2x uplift easily, I'd say 10x in single digit percentage of the time and I know I'm not using them to their full potential. We're living in an era of mass produced software. You can still be an artisan in this era, but you have to be aware.
• cvanelteren 3mo ago
  Nice write-up!
• Animats 3mo ago
  Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless. That's the sort of thing c2rust does - transpile to an low level language which is unsafe Rust with a set of functions that unsafely emulate C pointer semantics. You don't need an LLM for that. There's no point. It's not doing the job DARPA's TRACTOR program is trying to do - translate C to safe Rust. I've used c2rust. It works, but what you get out is like compiler output, not something you can work on.
  • 15155 3mo ago
    > That's easy, but useless The Rust toolchain is a delight in comparison to Zig's, and the unsafe code only need be temporary until humans (or, gasp, AI) address each class of underlying issue. This is a no-worse-off state to improve from.
  • cyberpunk 3mo ago
    Isn’t the point that it doesn’t matter if humans can work on it, as long as the AIs can?
  • Aurornis 3mo ago
    > Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless. You really need to escape the Zig vs Rust language wars bubble to get a real read on what Bun was doing. They started by attempting a more direct translation. Not quite transliteration but close. At this stage they wanted to bootstrap the codebase into Rust as quickly as possible using parallel agent sessions, which requires minimizing the number of refactors that cut across the codebase. After it was bootstrapped into Rust they continued on the rewrite to take advantage of Rust’s features. The anti-Rust side has been clinging to that first step as evidence that it’s all broken, ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step. The “unsafe” part is also confusing a lot of non-Rust devs who don’t understand that unsafe is used in cases of crossing FFI boundaries, which Bun does a lot of by nature
    • endospore 3mo ago
      > ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step. They are going to release the "intermediate step" with all its issues as v1.4. I think that says a lot about which party is ignoring facts. (hint: not me, not you, not Andrew) > The “unsafe” part is also confusing They are right in this case. The code base contains thousands of the most unsafe unsafe blocks I've ever seen in Rust.
• devinodowd 3mo ago
  Great Article. I appreciate the amount of detail you went into here to give everyone a fair hearing. Will there be a recording of your talk at the software should work conference next week? Thanks!
• aavshr 3mo ago
  I think Zig being a new and a low-resource language (not enough training data) is also one of the reasons Bun decided to use Rust as large language models will simply not be as good no matter how good the model is.
  • ACCount37 3mo ago
    My experience was that LLMs performed at Zig and Rust at about the same level? That is: worse than at something like JS or C or Python, but well enough to write code that works. And they only got better since I first tried them. Intuitively, Rust would perform worse because ownership is a different paradigm, while Zig is far more similar to things like C/C++. But I guess that's canceled out by the disparity in the language resource base.
• jeremyjh 3mo ago
  This paragraph is written by AI. I did not notice it earlier in the piece: > The piece about the migration process is very cool, with details that are reusable. No complaints, I think that’s the real contribution here. I particularly like the honesty in explaining that this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk, paving the way for redesign in future steps. That’s a sensible move explained well.
  • poncho_romero 3mo ago
    Why would the author write this paragraph alone using AI?
    • jeremyjh 3mo ago
      I doubt that is what happened, but this is where I quit reading so I did not evaluate the rest of the article. I'm assuming the previous section was either largely written by hand or it was much more carefully edited.
  • ozozozd 3mo ago
    Pretty sure this section’s title was “Say something nice” …he had to resort to AI for this part.
• jonkoops 3mo ago
  What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush. What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.
  • ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
    Andrew essentially wrote that “bun code was bad anyway”. And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate. I think these points are fairly clear from his blog post
    • jonkoops 3mo ago
      > And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate. If he doesn't want to get involved, then why even write this piece?
      • phoghed 3mo ago
        He essentially was having a tantrum
        • dakolli 3mo ago
          You're allowed to have a tantrum when a 10 figure company is doing a marketing stunt and shitting on your life's work to do so. If you spend X amount of years building something, and someone you know to be a mediocre dev trashes it in an effort to enrich themselves, you're allowed to expose the things you know about them. End of story. I wish more people would throw a tantrum. We should expose all these charleton and thieves.
• felixgallo 3mo ago
  People have got to stop falling for exaggerated rage bait.
  • lstodd 3mo ago
    But, but, how do we get to experience emotions otherwise? We have no life!
• sarmadgulzar 3mo ago
  Writing the blog post took longer than the million line Rust rewrite. That is all someone with a few brain cells needs to understand what’s going on here.
• rajayonin 3mo ago
  > The marketing needed to focus on how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free). ding ding ding!
• witx 3mo ago
  I'm with Andrew. It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that, no way to attest the veracity of it.
• akshaydeshraj 3mo ago
  | how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free) This, I don't think enough people pointed this out. We have been sold the "coding is solved" and "software engineering is over" shit by Anthropic folks for a while now. The discourse should have revolved around claude's capabilities and instead it became a Jared vs Andrew thing.
• r2vcap 3mo ago
  Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature. Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the language. Anthropic’s motives are clearly promotional, but even so, I would not choose Zig for any project.
  • vga1 3mo ago
    I'm on the same page with you that their AI stance is probably harmful for them -- but I think they wrote those as a reaction to the contributions from Bun and others. So your implied timeline is not entirely correct.
    • r2vcap 3mo ago
      Nobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack. Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      • vga1 3mo ago
        I don't know, sometimes programming language choices seem to be in the realm of theology, not computer science or engineering. What is more hurtful than somebody else making wrong religious choices?
      • shimman 3mo ago
        Yes, why would Zig respond seriously to a company that has proven to have utter complete disdain towards humanity? Why would anyone be upset that a company is ruining workers lives, poisoning innocent civilians, and being used to kill school children? That's just not fair!
• jswny 3mo ago
  I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone. Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not. Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.
• handoflixue 3mo ago
  "We wrap LLMs in Agent harnesses because AI isn’t enough." This feels equivalent to saying you're not a real coder if you need a compiler to hold your hand. What, a human coder isn't enough? Of course we're going to improve tools by building more tools on top of them. That's how we went from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages!
  • oblio 3mo ago
    Anthropic isn't selling that, that's the point. Anthropic is selling "coding is solved", worth $1tn. If they keep hiring developers and LLMs need huge procedural harnesses, then the hypocrisy is open for all to see. And worse for them, it probably means their business model is worth maybe 5-10x what Jetbrains is worth, not $1tn.
    • BetterThanSober 3mo ago
      I agree that "coding" isn't solved but LLMs needing a harness is not necessarily a huge hit on AI As for valuation, it's all a grift, always has been for anything hip in tech. SpaceX should've been in the $500b range and they have an actual rocket and working satellite constellations
      • oblio 3mo ago
        LLMs needing harnesses is a hit on AI because it means LLMs can't be extended a lot (or indefinitely as AI boosters hope). We're back to (enhanced) expert systems from the 80s and nobody is excited about those. And regarding SpaceX, SpaceX even without xAI didn't make a ton of money and it's business initiatives are super long horizon things. Moon bases won't be profitable for at least 10 years and Mars bases probably for 20+. Also, even though they are behind, competition is moving. China caught their first rocket yesterday (and we know they can move fast), BlueOrigin is behind but they have the money to keep going. The EU and India will keep investing and developing as rockets are a core concern for both, at some point they will have reusable rockets. These huge valuations for SpaceX are predicated on winner takes all mechanics, which are mostly software based. Many markets don't work like that since the cost to get another unit of revenue increases linearly with that unit. Not like software where extra copies and customers are basically free.
• TonyAlicea10 3mo ago
  > It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse. I think this is the most important line from this piece. Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time. This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism. I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.
• small_model 3mo ago
  There is going to be a lot of this kind of thing as AI makes writing manual code optional at best. A project that bans use of agentic coding is going to have a slower development cycle, as Zig is already fairly pedestrian (for said reasons) it's going to become less and less relevant i'm afraid. There will be a group of programming languages that become the main choices, (Rust, Go, Typescript, C++, Java, C, Lisp and Haskell) for agentic coding, Zig was slightly too late to the game, the great LLM cutoff has happened. Andrew is trying to fight the tsunami here with a paddle boat as his vision of Zig was conceived before LLM's landed on the scene and is likely unable to accept it.
  • krupan 3mo ago
    I love how many people are tech prophets now
    • small_model 3mo ago
      Do think the majority of SWEs will be hand cranking out code like it's 1999 in a few years?
      • krupan 3mo ago
        No, because nobody has been coding the same way since 1999. But that has nothing to do with LLMs
• Havoc 3mo ago
  Why are we even discussing stuff like work hour expectations in a story about language switch drama? Even if the guy is a terrible manager this still comes across as a determined attempt to find something negative to say. To me it’s telling how little focus there is on the technical merits of the rewrite from zig side. Anthropic claimed a bunch of victories and as best as I can tell nobody has even attempted to refute them. If I was running a project and someone threw it into an LLM rewrite and it comes out with improvements and silence on downsides I’d be pretty worried and try to address that. Instead we’re talking about working hours somehow
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• nihsett 3mo ago
  Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago. > Ray’s story: Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options. Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Kinda makes sense. They also tried to make a C compiler earlier in the year. Idk what happened to that. I guess it's an experiment without much downside for Anthropic, if it works use it to make a point about AI assisted coding - if it doesn't bun users will learn a costly lesson but who cares, it will just be another case study to make their product better. That said, I think it'd be great to see this actually work out.
  • alex_suzuki 3mo ago
    > Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago. Yes, Andrew edited it. Diff here: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commit/8b86ac915516a4b0fa937965d375da3bd0241f17 https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commit/8b86ac915...
• drbscl 3mo ago
  The thing is, it's possible to call a spade a spade without resorting to ad hominem. Andrew's post would've been more effective if he focused more on the Rust port being for marketing, and the shortcomings of Bun's Zig implementation. Instead, the first half of it solely consists of personal attacks.
• throwwwll 3mo ago
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• onesandofgrain 3mo ago
  AI is still 95% useless. The Zig article is spot on
• Mistletoe 3mo ago
  I can’t imagine working at a company called Oven and expecting it to be a good time.
• zombot 3mo ago
  An excellent analysis. So the Bun rewrite story is full of contradictions, irrationality, and bullshit. Not that that's really a surprise at this point.
• upmind 3mo ago
  Andrew Kelley's thoughts on Jared Sumner is insanely savage.
  • crowdhailer 3mo ago
    But fair?
• luciana1u 3mo ago
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• IshKebab 3mo ago
  There's so much weaselling in this post. His suggested solution to Zig memory errors is to never dynamically allocate memory? I mean... come on. He complains about the lack of motivational blog post until after the merge, but a) they aren't obliged to do that (where are all the "it's free so you can't complain" people now?), and b) they gave plenty of motivation in HN comments, the rewrite PR, etc. I don't like the idea of AI slop code either but it seems to work at least reasonably well for porting from one language to another.
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• 999900000999 3mo ago
  Every one feels a bit wrong here. Zig’s author, Andrew Kelley is out of line here. > We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide. https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht... So not only is Zig written by amateurs, but these amateurs also don’t know how to run a company? Who is Andrew to say this, Oven got an exit. As far as their investors and owners are concerned that’s the only real reason to exist. Assuming ( big assumption to be fair) all the early Bun employees got a fair amount of equity they’re all rich now. That’s a much better outcome than most startups. At my first startup we had 6 day work weeks. I still remember staying up until 2 or 3am manually installing Postgres again and again. All we got was a paycheck. Although for me I went from a minimum wage earning college dropout to a 6 figure software engineer( at a new company). As for actual coding… LLMs will always do better work in a well known stable language than something relatively new. I had to give up on trying to get LLMs to write working Haxe code. Haxe is too niche for LLMs to handle. I personally can’t stand Rust, it feels like it’s designed for machines to write. Zig is designed for humans. Outside of a 200k+ job offer you won’t see me learning Rust. Zig is rather pleasant. I can imagine writing a side project with it. Finally, my QA background is screaming in rage. You expect me to trust a project that you basically vibe coded in a week as a key part of my workflow? You know it works because the automated tests ( which I guess you also vibe coded) pass ? By that logic say I don’t like Rust, can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D). Is that enough to raise a VC round?
  • Thanemate 3mo ago
    >As for actual coding… LLMs will always do better work in a well known stable language than something relatively new. Say that louder for the people in the back, who still think that LLM companies don't influence the entire programming language and framework field, by merit of the fact that LLM's can only perform at scale after lots of training. And when we reach the point where source code doesn't need to be read, said companies will vendor lock you even harder by marketing their own LLM-optimized language and framework, promising everything and the moon in terms of productivity gains. First class support was the reason they acquired Bun.
• adamddev1 3mo ago
  In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between: A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products) B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of) What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B? Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites, does NOT meant that therefore people can get away with doing all software engineering with AI. B products require a whole other level of quality, stability, and extensibility. I'm not saying doing A with AI is a good idea either, I just think that it's a fallacy to say that because you can do A with AI, you can do B.
  • skydhash 3mo ago
    > Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites That requires some proof, because the trend is that users of A apps dislike the lack of engineering that comes with AI involvement.
    • adamddev1 3mo ago
      Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to be charitable for the sake of the argument. I think it's better to make nothing with AI.
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• ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
  Related: My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352 Rewriting Bun in Rust https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877
• Keyframe 3mo ago
  Sarcasm hat on - You know what, if LLMs were so infallible at coding and engineers useless for hands-on, then why even bother with anything except asm or even skip the mnemonics completely and go straight for the binary? Why even bother with abstract code when abstraction is now your LLM.
  • 15155 3mo ago
    Because underneath the code you have more than one architecture to support.
    • Keyframe 3mo ago
      if LLM is your abstraction - you give it a task to produce multiple targets. EASY PEASY, next!
      • 15155 3mo ago
        Determinism is a feature.
        • Keyframe 3mo ago
          Sarcasm hat off: that was the joke
• cryo32 3mo ago
  Great article. Makes me glad I still write C!
• fg137 3mo ago
  I have no beef in this flight -- I don't write Zig or Rust or use Bun (other than using Claude Code which runs on Bun, but that's an implementation detail that I don't care). But the more I look at this, the more I despise Anthropic and respect the Zig foundation. One is like "we can do whatever we want because WE HAVE MONEY, what can you do about it", the other looks at things from a engineering perspective. It will be sad if everyone buys Anthropic's hype, forget the basic engineering principles in this industry and think that AI solves every problem. Fortunately lots of people don't.
• soupape34 3mo ago
  Interesting thread. On the verification side — do you think formal methods or fuzzing scales better for catching the class of bugs LLM-generated code introduces?
• kome 3mo ago
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• CamouflagedKiwi 3mo ago
  Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to. The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rewrite your CLI console app in something else) and the final result is better (smaller and faster) although likely not on the most critical axes for them.
  • andriy_koval 3mo ago
    > why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? there is a chance they tried..
  • deleted 3mo ago
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• VBprogrammer 3mo ago
  I think the only point that matters is that having Anthropic owning a project which is written in a programming language where the community (or at least the leaders of it) have come out as openly hostile to AI generated code is a clear conflict of interest. I think Andrew Kelley might have been better to say just that and leave it - the comments about Bun's founders energy and motivations don't really add anything worth adding in my opinion.
  • randusername 3mo ago
    Yeah, hard to imagine opposing AI absolutists settling their differences. IMO all the technical arguments and attacks are post-rationalization; different orgs, different contexts, different goals. I think Kelley saw this, but couldn't resist muddying his point. I give him a pass. The rant [0] is too much, but the addendum about moving on is healthy, and I'd rather the BDFL be too spicy than not spicy enough. [0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.html https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...
• ticulatedspline 3mo ago
  A lot to unpack here, setting aside the drama I get a few takeaways: - Your AI code is probably as good as your human user's skills and attention: Seems pretty likely they were shying from style guides because the AI use was itself sloppy. I'm not a big AI user but if I just ask a chat model for some code it will give it to me, then I have to go over it and fix the code for our check-style. Without deliberately aligning all your AI use to enforce it style is hard to maintain. Existing lack of style was a technical debt they didn't want to pay. - The most popular language is probably the best language: I suspect the amount of training data on Rust is several orders of magnitude greater than Zig. I suspect they could have gotten there simply asking the LLM to rewrite the Zig thing in Zig, however I'm betting LLMs write much better rust code so why not take the opportunity to move to a language that will get all-around better results. - Technical bankruptcy is more favorable than paying technical debt: These migrations we're seeing seem to point to a future where it's simply easier to burn a code-base to the ground, take the test suite and re-implement rather than actually pay large amounts of technical debt. I think this is a pattern that will come up more often with heavily AI written codebases that become untenably noodley, or brittle.
• z0ltan 3mo ago
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• nicechianti 3mo ago
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• sire-vc 3mo ago
  The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person the less respect I have for temper tantrums such as these. Even if everything you say is correct, coming across as emotional and petty just does not help your case. This just makes Zig look like a zealot fighting a turf war rather than a serious ecosystem.
  • TheRealDunkirk 3mo ago
    Good grief! I can count at least 6 logical fallacies in your 3 sentences.
  • dogleash 3mo ago
    > The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person I don't think this statement has the effect you want it to have. You're not laying out the experience you're speaking from. You're just setting it up so that no matter how reasonable the next thing you say is, it will appear maximally arrogant and condescending.
    • bel8 3mo ago
      I disagree. It's fine to contextualise that an opinion solidifies over time. And your parent is right to point out that emotionally loading posts tend to be a disservice to the message being carried.
• wolttam 3mo ago
  Andrew may be a little bit grating to some (including me at times), but I value the perspectives that he brings. There is a lot of discussion about the exact tone and phrasing, etc, of Andrew's post. There's something there - we expect perfectly composed writing, never getting emotional, never saying how we actually feel about a specific individual's behaviour. Meanwhile, in private, we often let those emotions fly, name names, etc. I think Andrew gave us an actual look into how he feels about Jarred -- ambivalent, largely.
• cgannett 3mo ago
  "A lot of reasonably good coders have never seen an example of a good manager, and have all kinds of weird ideas about what management is." Banger of a quote that one.
• TacticalCoder 3mo ago
  BTW a quick question... Isn't it a case of "SVN trying to be CVS done right", as Linus Torvalds famously explained during his talk about Git at Google: SVN was doomed from the start because it's not possible to do CVS right. Is this Typescript Zig any good? (don't know anything about it) Is it even worth porting to another language? And why not an entirely new project? Ain't it an admission of failure of LLMs at writing new code? (porting ain't the same thing at all as writing a new project) No dig at Zig: I just want to know if it's not yet another turd of the extremely turdy JS ecosystem.
• blastonico 3mo ago
  There are billions of lines of garbage code out there written in C, C++, Java, you name it. So much garbage, it has driven people to create languages with tighter guardrails to help programmers. Yet, I've never seen those language creators blame anyone else. I don't recall Bjarne Stroustrup lashing out at people migrating from C++ to Java, Rust, or anything else. Maybe humility is just a generational thing.
• yearesadpeople 3mo ago
  Wow. Wonderful post; best read this year so far. Lots of gold in this one. I like the way the author slowly undressed the - social media influenced - hype to reveal both Anthropic and Bun as they are: awfully basic
• edude03 3mo ago
  Not to "glaze" the author as the kids say but this has to be one of the best written musings I've read on HN in a long time. I'm likely bias because it's written in "my style" but I feel like it's a rather fair and balanced approach to a nuanced and socially difficult topic.
• bergheim 3mo ago
  what I don't understand is, given the anthropic narrative, why on earth rewrite bun to rust, and not claude code to rust? why use typescript at all when the whole point is that languages don't matter anymore? I suppose it is solely because it would be a bad look on them to rewrite claude itself - it means they failed - but rewriting bun is a much better narrative - claude is fine! it's just his runtime we need fixing. and here is that token heavy story! so weird people are not commenting on this. it's like.. I dunno, rewrite linux in rust, because bun uses glibc, this will somehow make it better, so claude code somehow can run better? hell, start with UEFI.
  • softwaredoug 3mo ago
    Probably because agents in typescript don't waste time reasoning about so many different problems that come up in a lower level language. They stay higher level, and don't waste context on thinking about borrow checking, like you would in Rust.
  • mawadev 3mo ago
    I think this post completely destroyed anthropics narrative
• mawadev 3mo ago
  There are a lot of posts going on, but let me just post this link to a specific file of the bun zig code base so you can have your own impression: https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/bun-v1.1.42/src/bundler/bundle_v2.zig https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/bun-v1.1.42/src/bundler/... My take is they vibe coded too close to the sun
  • bel8 3mo ago
    I'm left with a good impression. Lot's of comments on the whys and historic context. Backed by tons of tests. Yes the file could use some modularisation and splitting into smaller parts but maybe the gains were weighted and judged against. That file is a great example of KISS.
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• doug_durham 3mo ago
  I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your developers. It's mostly their developers saying they are somewhat more productive. They have published papers showing that productivity gains are uneven.
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• mannanj 3mo ago
  It's hardly really about Anthropic. It's about all the people who funded them, and other AI companies, who are on the campaign by funding Anthropic seeking to end a majority of life for most humans. Because that's what it really appears to be about, preserving a rich man family's legacy so his children can live for another few generations before they over populate and humanity repeats the cycle of indefinite war, hoarding of resources, and killing to have more for yourself. I guess every rich, powerful generation though doesn't think that future will come now, so they keep manipulating their way to extracting more and more from people and stealing their way to the top. When a majority of the population is sick, naive, and overstimulated its not hard to convince them with your propaganda that that you are on their side and that the sacrifices they make for your power are worth it. of course they don't see how their life spans, their deaths, etc were for you cause and not theirs.
• buredoranna 3mo ago
  > we still need good judgement and communcation in deciding where to go I want to emphatically endorse this statement. This is where the human workload will shift to: making good decisions... understanding why one path is preferred over another. And collaborating and communicating in constructive ways. More to the point, humans excel at being able to recognize when a chosen path is no longer fruitful, or where a conversation devolves into the unproductive. We are constantly making decisions based on tradeoffs. We choose one approach over another, not so much because our chosen path is obviously superior, but because the peril on our chosen path is preferential to the peril on a different path. I have used ai to great utility in my design process, to help me understand the tradeoffs within any given endeavor, greatly helping in choosing which path to take. Thus far, I haven't seen an AI which can unilaterally be relied up on to always effect "good judgement" for the work it is tasked with completing. But once good judgement, and the correct path, is codified in markdown files, ai can be exceedingly efficient in carrying it out.
• daitangio 3mo ago
  Sometimes I suspect the rust-rewrite is just a way to advertise Claude Code power. In all my professional carrier so far, a full rewrite without reason is a recipe for disaster, see https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... This Joel Sposky article is always my northstar when I have such "temptations". My 2 cents
• ubedan 3mo ago
  I agree that both Andrew, and the author have numerous good points, and yet I see things differently. - I too am a fan of Andrew, and Zig, although all of my future plans currently are tied to Rust. - I think the crux is that we are talking about 2 Vibe-ish AI rewrites, one to Zig, and another to Rust. I believe the investment in both reasonably minimal beyond the cost of tokens. - I think that more adherence to a Zig style guide would probably have been very beneficial to the final work product. - I have high expectations that the Rust rewrite will yield a more stable work product out-of-the-box. I am looking forward to the post-analysis.
• blacksqr 3mo ago
  I have found myself wondering a lot lately about the alternative universe where all the effort and resources devoted to developing and using AI coding and debugging agents were instead simply dedicated to fuzzing human-generated code. How would the code quality and total usefulness of the results have compared?
  • ozgrakkurt 3mo ago
    It should have been possible to build a new LLVM alternative, a new chromium like browser and some other similar things imo and that would have been definitely more impactful for me. It is unimaginable how many static analysis tools or fuzzers could have been created with a fraction of LLM investment too. For example honggfuzz was created by a single engineer possibly in less than a years’s worth time
• segmondy 3mo ago
  if I had to pick a side, I would pick Andrew but I don't think his side matters as much. IMO, it doesn't matter the technical reason why Jared ported Bun, it's his project, his wanting to do so is enough. I think the issue is that Jared turned it into a technical subtle reason of why "Zig is bad" without meaning to, and Andrew goes on the defense. All that said, the coolest thing is that Jared did so, I don't care if it came out a bit worse with Rust, the interesting thing is here is what can be done with AI/LLM/Agents today. Yes, it might be worse, but on a reasonable enough timeline, it will get better. Folks get upset about these things. I did AOC in 2024 with LLM, my goal was not to top the leaderboard, but to see how good LOCAL LLMs could keep up. I did it with Qwen2.5-Coder-32B locally, and solved about 50%. Folks were often upset when I shared that, called it cheating, etc, even tho I often started about 8hrs after the competition due to timezone. It was so good, I suspected the cloud models would probably solve 75-80% and I concluded after my experiment that in 2025, LLM can solve it 100%. I didn't bother to try and the models were an order or magnitude better locally. No matter the take on AI, they are very capable tools and we are only beginning to figure out how they can be used. I don't think we should stop, surely it's frightening on what that would mean if it can really "takeoff". This fight is multi layered, Zig vs Rust, Writing good code vs bad code, having good development standard vs not, being honest and transparent in technical disclosure, attacking Zig vs attacking Jared, AI good vs AI not, etc.
• tipiirai 3mo ago
  > In the AI bubble, we are pressured to build things nobody wants, poorly. Pop the bubble. I'm sooo waiting for this to happen. I miss the old times where simplicity, clarity, and good architecture mattered.
• ericyd 3mo ago
  By far the most satisfying piece I've read in this saga. Favorite line: > I’m not the one saying that their environment resulted in a buggy unmaintainable mess, Bun is the one saying that.
• overgard 3mo ago
  I'm not involved in this community, but I watched Andrew's interview with JetBrains a few weeks ago and I was really impressed. I don't currently have a project that would benefit from zig, but it's a language I want to explore when I have a good use case for it. I view his take as blunt but entirely reasonable. Bun's rewrite has made me nervous about using it. I do have a project that would theoretically benefit from it, but that amount of vibe coding just makes me nervous. I'm not saying I'd never use it, but personally I'd rather wait for the dust to settle on it a bit. I feel like rewriting to a new language is going to be buggy no matter what (even if the tests pass), but an AI rewrite in a very short time makes me extra concerned. Just my 2 cents. Also, one thing I want to highlight in the article because I agree hard with it: > My advice? Don’t work for people that brag about 90 hour weeks. Work for people who will defend your ability to sleep at night. I used to work in the games industry, where crunch was the norm, and I don't think crunching really helped at all past a couple weeks. I'm not particularly old (early 40s), but my performance falls off a cliff if I sleep poorly or don't practice self care. To me, people working ultra-long hours for marathon periods of time are making a grave mistake. It usually ends up being productivity theater rather than real productivity. Taking care of yourself is really important for being productive.
  • ozozozd 3mo ago
    If left to my own devices, I can code 12-16 hour days. Have a crash day every 4-5 days, and then go back. It would be extremely unwise to merge even half of that stuff. I would frequently throw it away. Even before AI. It would be extremely naive to think that I am productive/efficient or responsible or a hard-worker for doing this. Hey, I can party the way I like to party. (I am old enough to catch myself and stop this cycle now) Edit: I was super impressed with him in the first 10 minutes. It’s very Knuth-like to create a programming language because you had trouble building an audio system.
• benmathes 3mo ago
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• roncesvalles 3mo ago
  >We’re supposed to let the Tech Bros go on about how cutting corners is some genius productivity hack. Vibecoding in a nutshell
• dwaltrip 3mo ago
  All I can say is... Wow, what a clusterfuck.
• bohrshaw 3mo ago
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• nurettin 3mo ago
  Anthropic should make their own language, and openai should follow suit.
• superloika 3mo ago
  Bravo for Andrew! We need strong leaders, not weak ones.
• AbstractH24 3mo ago
  Like any hype cycle some of it is… hype And like anything in the world things change. So will there be change in the way we code? Certainly. Are some claims overstated? Certainly.
• gstestaccount 3mo ago
  I wonder how AI is going to affect language development and discussions like this. Zig taking anti AI stance is commendable, but it’ll surely hurt adoption.
• ajpikul 3mo ago
  The only reason we're paying attention to this is because of the drama. The fact that rust is likely more interesting than zig (which is also interesting) is indictated by community size (and other signs like linux kernel inclusion). The fact that anthropic is very likely overselling their timeline and max-utility for an IPO is generally well accepted as well. Also that us tech bros are somewhat annoying is also well understood. But who doesn't love a good street fight?
• goofy_lemur 3mo ago
  All right there is so much hate for this rust rewrite, but I'm going to tell everybody that people are way way underestimating how sucky the Zig codebase was. Basically all the time people were having horrid memory leaks and stuff that they couldn't even figure out. So yeah, I get it, people are frustrated, but stop pretending Bun was this battle tested mature thing. It was a prototype, and still is. Switching it to Rust is understandable since they just couldn't fix the memory leaks. It was and still is in beta, because anything with memory leaks is beta. So yeah, I understand the concern but nobody would ever use it in production anyways for a server now because of the leaks so treat it like what it is - beta software and a cool experiment. Thanks all!