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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

#301

Post by Ygg2 »

hypfer wrote: post #152
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…

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Rel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true.

In hindsight having automated auto complete rewriting your code base wasn't something on 2000's radar.

Now switching from language to language is much easier. Just for Rust, there was Ladybird and Bun complete rewrite, that ran into zero things that Joel rallied about.

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

#303

Post by ramses0 »

TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244
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…

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and…

Fuben-Eki! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37169679

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

#304

Post by ryan_n »

phoghed wrote: post #229
kqp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The entire country is watching companies like Anthropic, openAi, etc.. right now... A pull request and blog post is a big deal.

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

#305

Post by mooreds »

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…

Yeah, I was just commenting on a LinkedIn post[0] (don't hate the player, hate the game :) ). In it, someone talked about the difference between creating software and owning it.

Creating software with AI is super easy--plan, prompt, test, go, go, go!

Owning software means you're responsible for maintaining it over time, fixing edge cases, operating it well, and more.

If you're building a one-off custom webapp to meet your needs, create away. If you're writing software for a business to run on, you're owning it. My fav article on this topic is this post[1] on durable vs disposable software.

0: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7482123...

1: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposable-code-is-here-to-sta...

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

#306

Post by dcre »

pizza234 wrote: post #56
vlaaad wrote: post #3

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.

> 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 futu…

> since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy

This premise makes no sense. AI makes rewrites to any language easy.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

eatonphil wrote: post #290
cfiggers wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If TigerBeetle is the Zig flagship then Zig is untenable for almost any team, because Tiger Style is untenable for almost any team. No, I think that Tiger Style makes Zig mostly unimportant. On the other hand, as a corporate backer for Zig, TigerBeetle is definitely a big deal. But in terms of exemplary and imitable projects in the ecosystem I would think something like Ghostty is the safer label for "flagship".

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by Der_Einzige »

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.

[flagged]

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

#309

Post by joshuamorton »

hatefulheart wrote: post #231
p-e-w wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it. You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another langu…

Python was invented two years before Java and didn’t move the needle until the mid 2010s. You are the typical mark for hype cycles. Get a clue will you.

Python was being used as a teaching language at flagship universities in the mid 2000s.

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

#310

Post by krupan »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #15

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?

It's a big precisely because so many people are blindly trusting AI company marketing. It blows my mind how many people, especially here on once-subversive hacker news, are not just swallowing the marketing but they are doing the marketing for these companies for free. That's why it needs to be talked about!
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