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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

#271

Post by BetterThanSober »

sph wrote: post #128
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…

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…

I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing

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

#272

Post by m4xp »

sph wrote: post #128
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…

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…

Keep in mind logic bug that ai makes are extremely hard and expensive to fix as the clanker needs to parse thousand and thousands of lines of text every prompt while a human tries to explain what it's obviously doing wrong.

I hate ai so much because its so easy to generate quick slop that "appears" functional.

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

#273

Post by bob001 »

bourbonproof wrote: post #165
laserbeam wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.

Viral is not an inherently good thing unless you're an influencer. Not all publicity is good publicity.

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

#274

Post by olzhasar »

ACCount37 wrote: post #180
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

A typical comment on Hackernews nowadays:

I used to think that there's a a room for better C -> Some unrelated complains about Rust and Go -> C has footguns, but they don't matter that much because I choose to not write my code myself anymore -> Therefore there's no room for better C.

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

#276

Post by bob001 »

tonypace wrote: post #227
laserbeam wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> penalty for rudeness is gone

I assume Andrew's goal isn't to be a viral influencer but to achieve some type of long term impact or goal. Programmers don't pick languages based on maximal vitriol and if anything do the opposite.

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

#277

Post by qwery »

jonkoops wrote: post #142

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 ref…

The facts as presented from the Bun side show a lack of technical merit for the rewrite. This shouldn't be surprising, because rewrites are bad engineering, in most cases.

The Bun project was started in Zig by someone with a lack of experience using the language, despite the massive scope and complexity, and was effectively a rewrite from another language in the first place.

From the Bun post:

> Bun started as a line-for-line port of esbuild's JavaScript & TypeScript transpiler from Go to Zig.

Then, a few years later, the entire codebase was thrown out to do another rewrite in another language.

What is there to address?

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

#278

Post by rafterydj »

well_ackshually wrote: post #66
ashishb wrote: post #23

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.

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.

Most of the people I've encountered that use Java are working on enterprise codebases that are a couple decades old at this point. And I'm totally unfamiliar, but I thought Kotlin was vaguely "Java for Android" - other than existing packages, are there other reasons to choose languages focused on the JVM?

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

#279

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ACCount37 wrote: post #180
petcat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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…

What makes go so awful to write? My impression was that Rust was hard, at least until you understand the borrow checker, and go was pretty easy. (This is my impression from outside, that is, I don't actually use either language.)

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

#280

Post by BetterThanSober »

oblio wrote: post #207
handoflixue wrote: post #188

"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!

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.

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

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