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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

#311

Post by dcre »

embedding-shape wrote: post #4

> 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, req…

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.

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

#312

Post by Ygg2 »

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.

People were for a few weeks commenting on why Jarred didn't write that Rust blog post.

Here are the comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48251340

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48241734

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48240996

Now he published it; it's a hit piece. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

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

#313

Post by krupan »

small_model wrote: post #193

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…

I love how many people are tech prophets now

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

#314

Post by cavoirom »

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 guess the Rust rewrite is the exit path of the Bun's author so that the others could "handle" the code base.

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

#316

Post by bombcar »

locknitpicker wrote: post #226
manphone wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Think how much LinkedIn slop wasn’t worth reading BEFORE AI; but at least some effort had to be put in. Now none is needed.

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

#317

Post by small_model »

krupan wrote: post #313
small_model wrote: post #193

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…

I love how many people are tech prophets now

Do think the majority of SWEs will be hand cranking out code like it's 1999 in a few years?

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

#318

Post by budsniffer952 »

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…

>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great!

But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most people don't care, even before AI. Building for yourself is fine.

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

#319

Post by pineapplepizza6 »

dcre wrote: post #306
pizza234 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This isn't true. AI couldn't rewrite Firefox in Brainfuck.

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

#320

Post by worrycue »

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…

> 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).

It’s interesting that Rust could become the most deployed but the least written (by humans) programming language if the dreams of AI bros come true.

If AI gets good enough to competently translate other languages to Rust then there is no point writing in Rust (a language with a steep learning curve and is high friction in use), you can just write in a low friction language like C, C++, Odin, Zig, … etc. and have AI translate it to Rust catching all the memory bugs in the process.

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