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Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#221

Post by busterarm »

simjnd wrote: post #210
RetroTechie wrote: post #97

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 su…

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X". I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum.

I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed most people’s ability to reason.

Anthropic/Bun are big, visible and adored…

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#222

Post by cfiggers »

petcat wrote: post #133
RetroTechie wrote: post #97

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 su…

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there. I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language becau…

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#223

Post by cognitiveinline »

simjnd wrote: post #204
cognitiveinline wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

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…

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.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#224

Post by [deleted] »

r2vcap wrote: post #218
vga1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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]

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#225

Post by petesergeant »

herrkanin wrote: post #117
RetroTechie wrote: post #97

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 su…

> 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.

I would go further and say that anyone who doesn't immediately identify this either isn't thinking clearly about this, or is intentionally ignoring it. I have no horse in this race AT ALL and this is _obviously_ the advantage.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#226

Post by locknitpicker »

manphone wrote: post #208
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

> It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

That's not it at all.

The problem with AI slop is that in general it's not worth reading, because to start off even the author deemed the topic wasn't even worth writing to begin with.

Worst, most AI slop blog spam was obviously not even reviewed by the bloggers who prompted them into existence. This means is also content that even the bloggers themselves felt wasn't worth reading at all.

But somehow they expect us to invest our time reading AI slop?

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#227

Post by tonypace »

laserbeam wrote: post #110
cropcirclbureau wrote: post #55

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 sp…

> 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.

I think if the last decade has taught us anything, its that decorum has zero to negative value in public communication. People pay attention to drama, and you need attention to be heard. When the penalty for rudeness is gone, just go for contention.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#228

Post by ACCount37 »

ctvo wrote: post #213
ACCount37 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development. On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the e…

I wouldn’t write Zig off yet. The faster compilation time is a giant moat. Depending on how LLM usage evolves it could be what ends up mattering.

I'm not writing Zig off myself. I would prefer if it succeeded. But the outlook is: not good, in my eyes.

Pre-2022, Zig was doing decently, but not particularly well. It didn't have Rust level of enthusiasts and ambassadors (love them or hate them, they did succeed in driving considerable Rust adoption), it didn't have a major corpo backing it, it had too much API instability to be truly relied on. Picking a stupid fight with Bun/Anthropic and doubling down on it isn't helping with any of that.

I also don't think compilation time makes for a good moat for agentic AI coding? Like, sure, less time wasted = better. But LLMs don't perceive time as humans do. They don't have the human "40 minutes of compile time = a hard forced context switch" quirk. The state of an LLM agent is as "stale" after a 40 minute build as it is after a 40 second build - no attention penalty for getting distracted.

There is a hard "wall clock time" iteration speed penalty, but I expect LLM coding to be more agentic, not less. In which case a single sub-agent stalling might not matter much? The orchestrator AI would just keep doing other things, and come back to the stalled sub-agent when it's ready. Once again: long stalls hurt the worst if they route through human attention. The less human attention there is in the system the cheaper they are.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#229

Post by phoghed »

kqp wrote: post #196
raincole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.

It was a pull request and a blog post which HN et al. collectively foamed at the mouth about. You’re acting like Anthropic sunk millions into a marketing campaign.

Re: Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

#230

Post by vga1 »

r2vcap wrote: post #218
vga1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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?

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