Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Software North Star

kristoff.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 166 posts

Re: My Software North Star

#151

Post by yoyomaindydjsj »

bsza wrote: post #41
flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

This might be a very naive take on my part, but I don't think of vibecoding as a competitor to actual coding the same way I don't think of doing amphetamines (even if they make you more productive in the short term) as a competitor to being clean. I think it's a self-destructive behavior that is ultimately going to degrade your critical thinking skills, especially if you're a beginner. As with everything, the smarter…

[dead]

Re: My Software North Star

#152

Post by ian_holt »

bsza wrote: post #138
pyth0 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I take amphetamines prescribed by a doctor for ADHD, and without them I am considerably less effective. And the same way your amphetamine analogy doesn't work, I think it similarly doesn't work for LLMs either. At the end of the day if you are more effective with something than without it, it would be silly to avoid it out of some sense of "purity".

I definitely did not mean using it as a prescription drug for a known condition. I meant using it without any medical indication, like many of us do. We know that amphetamines can lead to cognitive impairment [1] [2]. We know much less about reliance (over-reliance?) on AI, but what we know doesn't look good either [3] [4]. Of course, if you already live with a condition that makes it hard to concentrate, the benefit…

Applies a lot in life, eh. The old expression re muscles "if you don't use it, you lose it" applies a lot to coding or even in just normal day to day systems maintenance. Asking an AI agent, do to simple task just because "an agent is quicker or more effective" will quite often end up costing more in the long run do to one not remembering "how" to do something

Re: My Software North Star

#153

Post by remexre »

bsza wrote: post #41
flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

This might be a very naive take on my part, but I don't think of vibecoding as a competitor to actual coding the same way I don't think of doing amphetamines (even if they make you more productive in the short term) as a competitor to being clean. I think it's a self-destructive behavior that is ultimately going to degrade your critical thinking skills, especially if you're a beginner. As with everything, the smarter…

I take (prescribed) amphetamines and use LLMs, and I think "I wrote this while on amphetamines" will leave you with way better understanding of the code than "I vibecoded this?" Like, to an absurd degree?

Vibecoding $x gives you pretty much the understanding of "someone else did $x," which seems unsurprising to me. There's a lot of usecases for code where "someone else did $x" is a perfectly fine way to accomplish $x! There are also many cases where "someone else did $x" is not a substitute for "I did $x."

"I want a tmux theme that fits with my existing zsh and neovim themes." Is it useful to me to learn how tmux themes work? Eh, marginally maybe? I'm personally kinda hoping I'm not using tmux in 10 years, so probably not.

"I'm writing code for work, where a bad correctness bug would be very expensive." If I'm pulling in someone else's code, I /better/ be auditing that code.

Like, this seems like the obvious framing and a useful heuristic? Maybe the problem is the subject of "vibecoded" is usually "I vibecoded this with Claude," not "Claude vibecoded this with me?" IDK

Re: My Software North Star

#154

Post by saagarjha »

kristoff_it wrote: post #62
zozbot234 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing memory safe code in unsafe languages requires global reasoning, which LLMs are terrible at. The whole point of a type system or a borrow checker like Rust's is to thread the requirements for safety throughout the program syntax in a way that makes it possible to spot problems locally. That's why LLMs tend to be rather good at writing Rust.

> Writing memory safe code in unsafe languages requires global reasoning If you learn how to use arena allocators and in general use modern techniques, you don't need global reasoning to write correct memory management code pretty much never. If your code is a RAII and abstraction maze, then yes, you will probably need global reasoning, but that's not the case with Zig.

Not all code can be expressed well by an arena allocator.

Re: My Software North Star

#155

Post by saagarjha »

epolanski wrote: post #139
jeremyjh wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can write memory safe code in C (Redis, SQLite, OpenBSD, Git, etc), Do you think that this is a list of software that have never had memory bugs? It really is not practically possible to completely avoid a large class of memory bugs in C in just about any kind of very large commercial or open source codebase. Redis CVE-2025-49844 ("RediShell"): use-after-free in bundled Lua parser https://github.com/redis/redis…

[flagged]

Rust had 2+ and any C project has like 200+. It is not possible to write memory safe C code in practice. It may look like it is but it just is not.

Re: My Software North Star

#156

Post by liampulles »

flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

There are performance reasons to handle memory allocation manually and tactically. This is why languages which deal with memory manually are not going anywhere.

Whether Zig will become dominant in that space remains to be seen.

Re: My Software North Star

#157

Post by codethief »

KronisLV wrote: post #15
flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

> In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU Here's the project in question: https://github.com/roc-lang/roc I think Bun…

> Meanwhile, some projects are doing the opposite, like going from Rust to Zig, here's an example from a podcast I recently listened to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSXGf3oN2yU

Thanks for the link! Unfortunately, contrary to what the title suggests, that video seems to be more about AI than about the migration? (Sigh…) I did, however, find the following document where they explain why they migrated to Zig. It makes for a nice read: https://gist.github.com/rtfeldman/77fb430ee57b42f5f2ca973a39...

Re: My Software North Star

#158

Post by zaphirplane »

Ygg2 wrote: post #120
zaphirplane wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does nothing matter mean thou ? The extrapolation is very plausible outcome thou

https://xkcd.com/605/ No one can predict the future least of all humble extrapolation line.

Everything we do is about anticipation, from cooking to walking to driving. You maybe thinking 100% or nothing

Re: My Software North Star

#159

Post by mfru »

flooow wrote: post #7

I imagine it's a difficult time to be a Zig developer. In the near term, Bun choosing to switch from Zig to Rust specifically to fix all the memory errors seems to have done the Zig community some psychological damage. But more significantly, in the medium term it looks likely that AI coding is going to overtake the industry before Zig gets properly established. And it is going to be very hard to justify choosing Zig…

For me personally I found Zigs AI stance and the artisanal mindset very attractive.

So much so that I am at the moment doing the ziglings exercises and learning it over Rust (which I gave up on some time in the past, because it didn't spark "joy" for me; so far Zig does).

Sure, for now it is just a hobby programming lang to me, but it might become more than that.

Re: My Software North Star

#160

Post by rirze »

dnautics wrote: post #142
rirze wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the llms write pretty good zig I doubt this from my personal experience. Every week after a release, I see tweets complaining how AI wrote some depreciated code because Zig is making breaking changes every release. (They are valid in doing so, it's just not AI friendly yet)

claude and codex are pretty quick to figure out "oh that's not a thing anymore" and figure out what they need to do? i did a 0.15 -> 0.16 port of this library and most of it the LLM did https://github.com/E-xyza/zigler

I agree, when agents realize they're using old Zig semantics, they will adapt.

Doesn't help the training sets that Zig changes frequently though.

Post reply on HN