Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke • Hacker News Board

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

#421

Post by deaux » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

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…

Yes and no.

Let's first settle on the definition of vibecoding so that we're not miscommunicating over definitions. I'm using the one that seems the median definition nowadays: >95% of the code written by LLMs, As you said it's about time invested in thinking about it, yes. But remember that even pre-AI >90% of software got never used, it was dead on arrival. Look up "success rate of software projects in business".

You can put lots of time into thinking and vibecode everything. You can put very little time into thinking and write by hand. Of course, vibecoding makes the former much more likely. But nothing about it is inherent to it.

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

#422

Post by llm_nerd » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

sublinear wrote: post #77

virajk_31 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

web tech - HTML, CSS, JS, and based/derived frameworks

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.

>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.

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

#423

Post by hoppp » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

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…

Its true about the battle test

I wonder if new version of Bun has the same emotional values in Jarred's mind, I mean he did write it by hand and struggled for a long time and invested a lot of energy.

Meanwhile the rust rewrite just magically appeared to replace it.

Which one is more valuable for a person? High Effort or low effort?

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

#424

Post by woodruffw » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #378

woodruffw wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point. As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

> I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims Presenting only one side of argument (only pros, no cons, etc.) is deceptive and dishonest. The fact that they were incredibly focused on build time in Zig and didn't even talk about it as a tradeoff going to Rust is very telling.

Are we talking about the same post? This is the one I’m talking about[1], and I can’t see where it’s claimed that Rust’s build times are better. Apologies if I’m missing it.

(The one reference I found to Rust’s compile times is them talking about how they had to split their Rust rewrite into 100 crates. A plain reading of this is the opposite of what you’re saying: they’re pointing out that Rust’s compile times are slower, but that this wasn’t an overriding negative.)

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

#425

Post by lproven » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:53 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #216

pydry wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or rather because they are always just of poor quality

Define “quality” (I’m pretty sure both you and I would “know it when we see it”, but…)

There was an entire book about that 50 years ago, and last month someone brought that thinking and analysis to the LLM-bot issue:

EDIT: this is the one I was thinking of...

https://sinclairtarget.com/blog/2026/06/01/quality-in-the-ag...

But this is relevant too...

https://bersas.substack.com/p/zen-and-the-dance-of-generativ...

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

#426

Post by Aurornis » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #129

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…

> 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

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

#427

Post by piker » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:54 PM UTC

fnands wrote: post #166

piker wrote: post #114

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).

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.

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.

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

#428

Post by jgraham » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

27183 wrote: post #259

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.

Writing is thinking. If you don't spend time writing, then you didn't spend time thinking. LLMs don't think. Consequently, if you outsourced your writing to an LLM the resulting artifact was born of a thoughtless process. Instead of engaging your readers in your thought process you're tricking them with a puzzle. Readers will try to understand what you're thinking about (at least the non-passive ones will). This acti…

It's not that writing _is_ thinking, but (effective) writing _requires_ thinking. It forces you to take a collection of lose and incoherent thoughts and reify them into an argument that can hold its own weight.

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

#429

Post by renox » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

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…

> And, on the other end, C's warts, footguns and ancient quirks also matter less if you have an LLM plow through it.

'plow through it's?? An LLM can definitedly fall into these traps!

Happened to me a few months ago, I couldn't believe that an LLM would generate a use-after-free in not-so-complex code but it did.. Newer LLM seems better now but buyer beware!

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

#430

Post by Lerc » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:55 PM UTC

woodruffw wrote: post #28

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…

>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 think it is worse than that, the comments from people in threads about this suggest that this is an attitude that is creeping into the community. They may not be a majority, but if kinder souls decide to leave for a more welcoming community, the remainder will be more concentrated.