I do believe they were trying to use CodeRabbit to review their re-written code.
https://www.coderabbit.ai/blog/ai-can-migrate-your-entire-co...
How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
301–310 of 412 posts
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#302I don't quite understand the focus on the token cost of this rewrite. Obviously, we should examine if this rewrite is good, effective, good for the product etc., but the token cost seems ... not important? The marketing value of this to Anthropic (if Anthropic even cares, this might just be the Bun team selling past the close) is to show that such a rewrite is possible and delivers engineering value. If exactly this…
I'd say it's an important data point if you'd want to do something similar yourself.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
A human doing it is impressive. A human performing many computations a computer could do would be impressive. I don't get impressed when a computer computes a number. A language machine translating is just... doing what a language machine does? When a language machine starts doing something other than translation, I will be impressed. If computers starting singing without any human intervention, for example, would be…
>A language machine translating is just... doing what a language machine does? Really? We had language machines for decades that couldn't do it. One that could was only built in the last 2 years max but that's something you expect from language machines? Lol Okay
If a machine made to do language things in this day and age having trillions of dollars invested in doing language, I am not shocked at all that a trillion dollar language machine translates programming languages. It really is not surprising to me. I'd be surprised if a trillion dollar language machine doesn't do as fundamental a linguistic capability as translation. It's like being shocked that a language machine spews out language? What else does a language machine do?
A calculator that can find all primes will be cool. A language machine that translates english into JavaScript is cool. A language machine that translates Zig into Rust is cool. Language machines are cool, not awe-inspiring or surprising to me.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#304I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create st…
I'd like more people to be writing about this, because I find it fascinating. I have my own private project that is heavily LLM-coded, just to learn about what it's like. It's amazing how everything is different yet everything is the same. Big complicated features can start working quickly and give a massive endorphin boost, but then fixing them up and integrating them in properly and polishing the UI? It all feels even more painful having experienced the heady thrill of the initial implementation. And things get to a point where you can feel the inertia set in, the point where things have gotten so hacked up that the LLM can't make any progress without creating an even bigger mess. It's the point where you have to go back and fix up the architecture, or scrap the whole thing and restart with a better plan, or a bit of both (rewind to the "last sane point"). It's like developing with a jetpack -- you can go way faster towards your goal, and you can slam into walls way faster and more painfully too.
I think there are tons of learnings to be shared about how to do this stuff, but it seems like it's all blocked behind arguments over whether AI is the best or worst thing ever, and penis-measuring contents about how to hold the tool. The net benefit is a very open question, and both the doom and gloom perspective and the AI booster perspective are valuable and have a lot of things right. But there's a dearth of information about what things work, what things don't, what happens in the process of using AI, how to adjust one's behavior and which of those adjustments is harmful even if effective.
But then, I'm part of the problem. I keep meaning to write up a series of experience reports, but it's a lot of work. More fun to vibe a new feature into existence, or to finally fix a UI wart...
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
This might be terminology that's used differently in different places. For instance, in video games it is extremely common to use "postmortem" to mean "post-shipping." Example: https://blog.codinghorror.com/game-development-postmortems/ Note the dual emphasis on both "what went right" and "what went wrong," not just one or the other.
But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin. It’s synonymous with autopsy! I know people misuse borrowed words all the time, but come on?!
> But postmortem is literally “post death” in Latin.
Sure, that's true. It's not really relevant to people who don't speak Latin.
> It’s synonymous with autopsy!
This isn't true. I have no idea how you got here. In English an autopsy is a surgical procedure performed on a corpse for the purpose of identifying the cause of death. In particular, it's a noun. "Post-mortem" in the etymologically literal "after death" sense is an adverb or adjective identifying whatever it is as taking place chronologically after some contextually-specified death.
But, you seem to put some weight on the etymology of a word independently of its current meaning. In that case autopsy "literally means" to witness something personally, as opposed to hearing about it from someone else. (It's "self-eye" in Greek just as post mortem is "after death" in Latin.) Somehow I doubt that's what you had in mind...?
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#306I really do not understand how software developer think anymore. Using a LLM to translate a project in a short time, is by itself incredible. Just like one-shot whatever office clone. But what makes software is not the fast creation of a "product" but that actual development of its features. Figuring out how everything needs to work together, fixing the bugs, and the o so boring UI work. I have used LLMs to create st…
I'd like more people to be writing about this, because I find it fascinating. I have my own private project that is heavily LLM-coded, just to learn about what it's like. It's amazing how everything is different yet everything is the same. Big complicated features can start working quickly and give a massive endorphin boost, but then fixing them up and integrating them in properly and polishing the UI? It all feels e…
To build a robust piece of deep-functionality software (like an MS Word clone) with an LLM, you have to start from the underlying architectural decisions, particularly how data is structured and how it flows through the system.
If you have an LLM or human just start coding up something without nailing down those decisions first, then he/she/it will implicitly make those decisions arbitrarily in the moment (usually based more on pattern-matching than real weighing of alternatives) and the result will be a massive mess.
Ideally for an LLM, you'd hand-write a highly detailed DESIGN.md file to encode those decisions and a suite of test fixtures to enforce them.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you explore Github, you're gonna see thousands of abandoned game engines, compilers for made-up languages. And that has been happening since before the LLM era. Yeah, but the people authoring those learned something. > I used to be part of an OS messaging board in the early 2000s and almost everyone had their own OS. Great example! I, too, once had my own toy OS, and browsed OSDev wiki nonstop. The thing is no o…
Probably not, but sometimes I wonder if the lowered activation bump lets more people try it, even if they just vibecode the whole thing, and maybe learn a thing or two in the process? They wouldn't learn as much as they would if they did it by hand, but they would've never done it by hand in the first place - so this is better maybe? I don't know. The whole field is in a weird place right now, all previous rules of t…
My gut says there are fewer people in that group than there are people who would've learned something who now decided learning something isn't worth the effort. A net loss.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#308I am fascinated by the discourse around this Bun rewrite. I read a lot of drama and personal accusations, there are pieces like this one trying to extract clues, and it seems everyone has a deeper ideological concern behind whatever they are trying to say. For this article, it seems to be skepticism towards AI and how successful it can be at replacing programmers. Other takes, like the one from the Zig maintainer, we…
> so from my perspective I don't see why we should be skeptical that frontier LLMs guided by experienced devs can translate whole libraries like that
There's a laundry list of reasons to be skeptical about LLM results in general. The biggest one is that LLMs are excellent at creating output that looks right but is nevertheless still wrong.
In this particular case, there's also a specific reason: This is obviously a marketing stunt regardless of whether the claimed results hold up. Anthropic has a long history of just lying and making shit up, so any results are subject to extra scrutiny.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
An LLM definitely can do that work, but LLMs have a tendency to follow the path of least resistance unless you force them to do things properly and carefully supervise them.
> LLMs have a tendency to follow the path of least resistance That's a really strong motivation for the Rust port. It's literally impossible to take a path not leading to an unacceptable outcome because the Rust compiler fails the compile if code no longer marked "unsafe" is still actually unsafe, and the tests fail if the implementation is incorrect. The compiler actively helps to force the LLM to do things properly…
…only if you actually force the LLM not to use `unsafe` somehow! And one must remember that `unsafe` can have all sorts of non-local effects. One way to be maliciously compliant (or in the LLM's case, I guess it's more incompetence than malice) is to make a “safe” function that does an `unsafe` operation for you, and then replace every usage of that unsafe operation with your “safe” function. You can remove hundreds of unsafe blocks that way without any improvement in safety.
Re: How is the Bun rewrite in Rust going?
#310As a comparison point, someone decided to try to fix the issues in the Zig original and is now claiming sub-second build times, plus fixed bugs, by modernizing the codebase and sticking with best practices - indicating that all of the issues that justified the rewrite were self-inflicted and addressable. https://ziggit.dev/t/buz-a-drop-in-replacement-for-bun-using... I have no skin in this game, and the Zig version i…
This looks like a meme or attempt at a joke.
> Bun is the quintessential AI slop project at this point. Inheriting that is no easy task. I don’t think any human should sacrifice their sanity untangling this mess of 600K lines of slop code. For that reason, I will not be accepting any human-coded contributions until I deem the project to be in a sane enough shape. It will likely require most subsystems to be rewritten.
They're refusing to accept human-authored contributions. They're using LLMs to do the work. The author says they'll use LLMs to de-slop what they think is slop, and humans are banned from contributing.
I don't think you should take this seriously.