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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

#511

Post by woodruffw »

Arainach wrote: post #479
woodruffw wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are they making a big fuss?

I knew that LLMs had caused reading comprehension to tank, but I quite literally already directly answered that question - as did the original article under discussion here.

You haven’t answered it, and I can’t find a fair reading that would lend itself to that interpretation either. You can easily correct me by quoting the part of the Bun post that you find to be “making a big fuss.”

(Surely a relatively bland technical criticism of Zig - one that gets couched with praise - does not count as “a big fuss.”)

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

#512

Post by lioeters »

skybrian wrote: post #343
qwery wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lin…

Porting TypeScript to Go in 7.0 doesn’t seem like bad engineering. Neither does this port, given that that Bun started out in a somewhat buggy state.

Completely different approaches. The TypeScript Go port was done responsibly, reviewing every line ported, publishing both runtimes in parallel to give it time for real-life battle testing, with plenty of communication to the community about what was happening.

The Bun Rust port was irresponsible and unprofessional, merging a million lines of unreviewed code while gaslighting the community, relentlessly casting shade on Zig while pretending to be neutral and objective. The Bun rewrite was not just bad engineering, but also (one might say "stinky") management and community relations.

It's no wonder the author of Zig blew up emotionally - which was also unprofessional but at least it was honest and human, unlike Bun's author.

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

#513

Post by afavour »

lolinder wrote: post #510
afavour wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the article mentions, the follow on question from that is: why does that matter if your codebase is written exclusively by AI agents?

Because if you have to quadruple the number of tokens in your code base in order to make the Zig provably safe, you have 1/4 of the context window to do useful work.

So why not say that? Perhaps because it highlights a flaw in AI agent workflows?

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

#514

Post by lolinder »

simjnd wrote: post #462
lolinder wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very next sentence justifies why they didn't do it: it argues that they would have ended up with what was technically Zig but something that was much less ergonomic than what would be expected from Zig. You can argue that that's a bad justification for not doing it, but that's a debate on the technical merits, not a claim that they didn't provide justification.

Yeah since my whole point is about the technical merits of the rewrite article, I don't count that as justification. Why is just a wrapper type "less ergonomic"? Everybody does that all the time in every language. And then if you can convince me it is less "ergonomic": why does it matter if it solves the problem? And that is considering humans write the code manually. Why does it matter if agents write the code? This…

The example shows three extra lines of code, two of which are `defer`s. I'm not an expert in Zig and can't tell you whether the example they give is contrived, but the claim they're making is way more than "a wrapper type".

> And that is considering humans write the code manually. Why does it matter if agents write the code? This makes no sense.

Because the particular form of non-ergonomic code that is demonstrated here amounts to a quadrupling of tokens. That's a substantial hit to the context window for safety that isn't even statically enforced.

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

#515

Post by nsagent »

sporkland wrote: post #451
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…

> There's so much good stuff in this post. The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point. They aren't managing some message and trying to teach th…

Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses.

Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomenon. See "Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?" [1] for example.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004

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

#517

Post by edude03 »

mech998877 wrote: post #480
TeriyakiBomb wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I disagree with this, and I've been spending time thinking about it because some of my friends had a similar conversation. The friction itself does not add value. The time spent thinking on the problem does. Friction should be minimized beyond the absolute bare minimum. Programming is a discipline where your workstation is already streamlined, and it is easy to forget where the friction is. Programming is done in a w…

I liken it to dieting. If your only goal is to be certain weight, then learning how to cook, learning how to portion, learning to make a meal plan, learning about macro nutrients is all "friction" now that we have GLPs. And maybe using a meal prep service reduces some "unnecessary friction" but you still would have to learn a bunch of useful skills along the way.

Concretely, If your only goal is to produce "software" then learning about design, planning, project management, testing etc is all unnecessary friction when you can just ask an LLM to "make it so"

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

#518

Post by Havoc »

999900000999 wrote: post #281

Every one feels a bit wrong here. Zig’s author, Andrew Kelley is out of line here. > We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide. https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht... So not only is Zig written by amateurs, but these a…

> can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D).

Probably. Likely would work with sub fable class model too.

> Is that enough to raise a VC round?

Doubtful. Think this move only works for someone with an existing product and following

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

#519

Post by woodruffw »

Lerc wrote: post #430
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 mor…

I honestly hope that isn’t true. I’ve interacted with some Zig projects (and some people I’d characterize as Zig evangelists, in a positive way), and my experiences with both were very good.

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

#520

Post by lolinder »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #455
lolinder wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the end state were unsafe Rust, you'd be right, but that's explicitly not the intended end state. Unsafe Rust was the reachable first step . Now they have a Rust version and can iteratively remove `unsafe`, which they couldn't do before when it was in Zig.

It's the wrong abstraction though and I am kind of not surprised the Bun maintainers went way. The correct abstraction would be to translate into Rust while using `clone` and `copy` liberally and then iteratively converting to a borrowing model. Nowhere at all was an introduction of the `unsafe` keyword needed.

That's only the correct abstraction if you intended to hold off on releasing the rewrite until you were completely finished, because there's no universe where Bun of all projects releases a production version that uses clone and copy liberally.

Unsafe in theory in a transliteration is only as unsafe as the original Zig was, which makes it a perfectly reasonable place to land as a transition point in a way that introducing large numbers of allocations simply isn't.

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