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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

#681

Post by icodar »

sph wrote: post #356
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…

Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience. In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more, you might as well show the You Win screen. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction. What LLM hav…

Some friction can be painful. It's not always beneficial.

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

#682

Post by raincole »

jraph wrote: post #92
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.

But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite. Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make th…

There was an almost exact example of this: City Skyline 2. It's (was) a poorly optimized game and they said Unity's DOTS didn't match their expectation, making Unity look bad, while some issues (like they didn't use LoD where they should have) weren't Unity's fault.

And even in this case, it'd be extremely weird if Unity published a blog post about how City Skyline's studio is a "Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective" (quoting Andrew word by word here).

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

#683

Post by lunar_mycroft »

marshray wrote: post #664
selfmodruntime wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is untrue. You can do a file by file translation by using clone and copy liberally. After you're done, you can incrementally introduce borrowing.

Well, only if Clone/Copy is compatible with the semantics of the API. I.e., the called function doesn't need to modify anything. No &mut params (or data members) except perhaps `&mut self` (which would refer to definitions the same file). That's usually the case for Rust programs because the language encourages it. Are Zig programs like that?

To be fair, you can throw an Arc> or Rc> at it if you're starting from something that has multiple "mutable borrows", but that adds runtime cost and complexity.

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

#684

Post by adwn »

dakolli wrote: post #342
bob001 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

uhhh, that's not how the how that figure speech goes. There's a reason why people say all publicity is good publicity, and you can't just flip that to fit your perspective.

People repeat that figure of speech because it's a meme (in the original sense of the word), not because it's unconditionally true.

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

#685

Post by naasking »

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…

> Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

That which can be created with little effort can be dismissed with little fanfare, since it can easily be recreated later if there's a need.

The other category of AI abandonware is one-off stuff. It did its job and there's no further use for it.

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

#687

Post by pmg101 »

bayindirh wrote: post #469
sph wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a widespread belief in tech that 'removing friction' is a good direction to aim for. But you can have too little friction that completely ruins a product and the user experience. In game design friction very important; remove all friction and you don't even have a game any more, you might as well show the You Win screen. My favourite metaphor for it is sex: there is no sex without friction. What LLM hav…

You can't build muscle without resistance, you can't cook ideas without friction. Both needs heat.

If you wanna travel faster you can build muscle, or you can just get in a car.

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

#688

Post by [deleted] »

doug_durham wrote: post #563

I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your developers. It's mostly their developers saying they are somewhat more productive. They have published papers showing that productivity gains are uneven.

[deleted]

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

#689

Post by krater23 »

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…

I'm sure that Jehovah's Witnesses believe what they say. But thats not a reason to let them in my house.

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

#690

Post by [deleted] »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #381

Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to. The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rew…

[deleted]
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