Live data from Hacker News

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

801–810 of 862 posts

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

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key word is "already". I myself absolutely expect world changing results. But that will need time. I can only say what I know. My own experiments in building nocodo, a coding agent are 12-13 years old. Pre-LLM. I used template based code generation and related ideas. Template processors and what not. nocodo.com is with me since 2013 maybe, you can verify. I am a software engineer, most of my experiments are on Gi…

Interesting! I am curious to ask someone who has been working on no-code tools for so long: I've been reading about no code platforms from the 1990s, and how all of those ended up failing. The reason I've seen cited most is that the tools/platforms did not allow for enough variability to do the jobs that people wanted (without becoming a full programming language themselves). What do you think about that in the conte…

"company makes and distributes a specialized coding agent for CSS" - weird that you think this is a path because I think this is not as appreciated as it should be.

No-code has been in a poor state for many reasons. I agree that people want more generic software to be built and the platforms did not allow for enough variability. This is what being better enabled with LLMs.

I think coding agents, particularly Claude Code, makes people think that models are the key. Some people disagree. I disagree as well. I think small models with lots of deterministic code is the way. But this will not fill Anthropic's or OpenAI's pockets.

Using an LSP, for example is recent in coding agents. But if you think about it, we should have started with that. Most agents expect LLMs to know too broadly. I would instead create 40 (random number) agents - one for each language and part of the stack. This is why your CSS example is interesting. I create just an agent for the ORM related code in a Rust/Diesel based coding agent. It worked with a 4B parameter model!

People will fight over "worked" but basically what I did was create deterministic code generator for the ORM layer - schema, model and model accessor or mutator functions and then asked the tiny model to fill in the code with lots of code example straight from the official docs. It played well for many different kinds of prompts - all focused only on model related changes.

What if we create many layers of this - a higher level agent breaks human prompts into an intermediate language and then tech-stack focused agents write the code within deterministic tooling. Agents cannot read or write any file they want - they are specific to that part of the stack, linter, compiler, etc. kick in automatically.

You get the idea.

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

#802

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational. Sigh, there definitely an attitude creeping into the community and it's a huge turn off unfortunately.

>There seems to be a team sport mentality with AI topic in HN these days. Almost feels like people are picking sides, and thus not being very thoughtful or rational. If you are financially set for the rest of your life - Pro AI If you are not financially set for the rest of your life - Anti AI

We've had this discussion since the first beta of chatgpt was out and you "completely rational" people keep insisting AI is 100% perfect and better than any software developer.

Just because it's better than you doesn't mean it's better than everyone else :)

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

#803

I stand with Andrew. As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus. And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a sp…

Wankfluencer has now been added to my lexicon. It's a word that feels like it should always have existed, but didn't. So very aptly describes these personas who would pimp their own mother for a t-shirt with a logo on it.

The fact of the matter is, the reason Bun chose to go with Zig in the first place was for clout and clout only. Bun is a textbook case of a wankfluencer operation: unnecessary rewrite of an existing useful project using the latest hot language or ecosystem to get lip-service by influencers and get easy VC buy in.

There's nothing wrong with chasing a little clout really but I was not surprised to hear Bun's engineering itself wasn't up to par. A single person was shipping not just a runtime but half the ecosystem/tooling justified by sketchy benchmarks? As someone very familiar with the effort it takes to ship solid code in Node and Deno and the ecosystem writ large, their early claims of performance and being production ready were very suspect and it was unfortunately proven false once it duped real projects into getting adoption.

Again, there's nothing wrong being overly ambitious and failing. But I dare anyone to refute that in Oven.sh and many other twitter first projects today (usually in the Js ecosystem), solid engineering and actual usefulness takes a backseat to being viral and being featured in some idiot's weekly roundup news segment.

If you're familiar with Kelley's and the Zig Foundation ethos, it's not surprising that there was internal clashes and drama with such a project.

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

#804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C++ programmer here. I've looked at transitioning some of my code to Rust; not particularly out of a dissatisfaction with C++ but more just out of curiosity. I've always ended up deciding against it though, I feel like its safety features just come at too high of a price for the kind of work I do. If I was writing something that needs to be super secure like a web server or something I think it would make a lot of se…

The safety aspects do get very hyped. It's better to consider the language strict about correctness; memory safety falls out of that, but so does other stuff, like less logic bugs.

Thing is, this is from someone that likes Rust, but for various reasons has to reach out to C++ when going outside my daily use of managed languages, while C++ will never be as safer as Rust, there are many tools to get us half way there.

The big problem is that many projects keep ignoring those tools, the way Zig sorts out reporting use after free errors, the same solution exists for C and C++ for about 30 years now.

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

#805
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 would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

TigerBeetle is hardly a product to drive Zig adoption.

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

#806

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not clear to me what you mean by this. TigerBeetle calculates all the memory it needs at startup. It allocates that much memory once. It does not allocate memory dynamically. This only works for very specific use cases, like a fixed server size where you know exactly how much memory you want to allocate to a process. It’s not portable to general purpose computing, where it’s expected that apps aren’t allocatin…

> This only works for very specific use cases, like a fixed server size where you know exactly how much memory you want to allocate to a process. So, like, the JVM with its "initial heap size" setting? After reserving that space from the OS on startup, pieces of the space are then handed out by the JVM's internal allocator, where and when needed. If initial heap size and max heap size are the same, that initial one i…

There isn't such thing as "The JVM", there is a standard with several implementations, which one with their own approach to memory management.

You might be mixing it with the reference implementation for the standard, OpenJDK, and even then, it depends pretty much on which set of configuration parameters are given.

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

#807
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keeping it to the most mainstream, Java is a mighty fine choice as well, with even better options for third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry than most of the above.

I think most organizations don't want to increase their Java usage. And the reason is not technical. Technically, it is a great language. Legally, it feels risky to most.

I think that's absolute wrong.

The situation with Java is absolutely clear.

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

#808
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make. Yes, “it could have been any other company”, but it wasn’t, it was this one. Had it been any other company, we’d be talking about that other company; because it was this one, we’re talking about this one.

My point is that the article starts with > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering But that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly. Why not just call it a bluff and move on rather than making a mountain out of molehill

>that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly

That's true also if we see the impact their (and other frontier AI) tools have on employment and development practices.

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

#809
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK zig is not trying to be "better C++" (that is Rust), zig is more like "better C". a ergonomic low level lang with very little abstractions. zig explicitly doesn't want to be better C++ or rust

Oh, I get that. That’s what I’m saying. I hear “Better C” and my initial reaction is “what’s the point”. Like, why would you aim for “Worse C++”? I mean, compile times. That’s fair.

Even those aren't that bad, when using C++20 modules, coupled with binary libraries.

Granted we "aren't modules" yet, unless being on latest compilers with msbuild/cmake/ninja tooling.

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

#810

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…

This is why IBM still sells so much ancient z/OS mainframe code, things like CICS are the most tested code in existence.

And you can even program for z/OS and Aix with Go and Rust.

https://www.ibm.com/products/open-enterprise-sdk-go-zos

https://www.ibm.com/products/open-sdk-for-rust-aix

This is the kind of industry support Zig is still years away to get, and in the AI age, most likely will never happen.

Post reply on HN