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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

#191

Post by brabel »

pydry wrote: post #145
khalic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s assume their marketing argument is in good faith (it isn’t, they’re just capturing market knowing very well they won’t replace most software dev): Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. They make it more efficient, which could lead to less software developer. How is this “campaigning to end software engineering”? It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst

>Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthro...

This article explains what they mean by end of software engineering:

> his engineering teams rarely write code from scratch anymore. The role has shifted from creation to orchestration. Engineers now operate as “conductors”—defining high-level problems, prompting AI systems to generate implementations, then reviewing and integrating outputs.

Well I have been working like that as well but sure as hell I still consider that to be software engineering. You won’t get anywhere if you try doing this without being a software engineer. At least not very far, see how far purely vibe coded applications can get.

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

#192

Post by shirol »

petcat wrote: post #133
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…

> 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…

> Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust.

Zig has 110 open "segfault" issues [1] versus Rust's 175 open "segfault" issues [2]. So, by your logic, Rust is also bad.

edit: I was just trying to point out that the parent's "just search segfault" argument is lazy. Also, Zig is still in beta.

[1] https://codeberg.org/ziglang/zig/issues?state=open&type=all&...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20stat...

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

#193

Post by small_model »

There is going to be a lot of this kind of thing as AI makes writing manual code optional at best. A project that bans use of agentic coding is going to have a slower development cycle, as Zig is already fairly pedestrian (for said reasons) it's going to become less and less relevant i'm afraid.

There will be a group of programming languages that become the main choices, (Rust, Go, Typescript, C++, Java, C, Lisp and Haskell) for agentic coding, Zig was slightly too late to the game, the great LLM cutoff has happened.

Andrew is trying to fight the tsunami here with a paddle boat as his vision of Zig was conceived before LLM's landed on the scene and is likely unable to accept it.

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

#194

Post by Havoc »

Why are we even discussing stuff like work hour expectations in a story about language switch drama?

Even if the guy is a terrible manager this still comes across as a determined attempt to find something negative to say.

To me it’s telling how little focus there is on the technical merits of the rewrite from zig side. Anthropic claimed a bunch of victories and as best as I can tell nobody has even attempted to refute them.

If I was running a project and someone threw it into an LLM rewrite and it comes out with improvements and silence on downsides I’d be pretty worried and try to address that. Instead we’re talking about working hours somehow

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

#195

Post by [deleted] »

lelanthran wrote: post #130
eru wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.

> Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another. Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun. The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from. Zig -> Rust : "We had all thes…

[deleted]

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

#196

Post by kqp »

raincole wrote: post #16
vlaaad wrote: post #3

Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks. For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

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.

Anthropic is massively bigger than a studio, Zig is massively smaller than Unity, and it wasn’t a quiet switch, it was a huge publicity event. It’s more like the #1 movie of the year being “The Profound Joy of Finally Leaving Unity”. Sometimes things are big enough to warrant a response.

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

#197

Post by piker »

kawogi wrote: post #139
piker wrote: post #114

Wow, it's unsafe Rust? That seems... like the worst of all worlds. If nobody knows why the unsafe is required there's no way they'll be able to unwind it. If they can't unwind it then they're in a worse version of C (+ cargo).

IIUC that was meant as an intermediate step (which isn't uncommon), which IMO makes the translation way less exciting. The interesting part will be whether they can transform that "mechanical Rust" into something idiomatic. I'm waiting ...

Fair, but that's also kinda like saying "we translated it to ASM as an intermediate step to C". The hard (and valuable) part is safe rust. If unsafe is everywhere, there will be abstractions that simply have to be reengineered to use safe rust. Maybe it's a way to hit the "finish line" quick in terms of using Rust but a pure unsafe translation seems almost as far away as the original Zig project.

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

#198

Post by post-it »

shirol wrote: post #192
petcat wrote: 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…

> Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust. Zig has 110 open "segfault" issues [1] versus Rust's 175 open "segfault" issues [2]. So, by your logic, Rust is also bad. edit: I was just trying to point out that the parent's "just search segfault" argument is lazy. Also, Zig is still i…

You're not seriously out here posting raw numbers without considering the base rate are you

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

#199

Post by entrope »

pydry wrote: post #145
khalic wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s assume their marketing argument is in good faith (it isn’t, they’re just capturing market knowing very well they won’t replace most software dev): Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. They make it more efficient, which could lead to less software developer. How is this “campaigning to end software engineering”? It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst

>Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthro...

Can you point out exactly where it says that? As I read it, the claim is that AI boosts the productivity of writing code to the point that it's usually not productive for humans to write code directly. I think that boost only goes so far -- safety-critical code still needs to be well-understood by people, and a lot of the higher level thinking has insufficient ground truth to train AIs on it -- but it's fundamentally a claim about transforming software development rather than ending it.

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

#200

Post by vga1 »

r2vcap wrote: post #170

Those problems are partly attributable to Zig itself. If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened. Completely shutting out one side of the industry and taking a dogmatic position is not helpful, especially for a pre-1.0 language that is still relatively immature. Now the Zig community is attacking one of the largest and best-known codebases ever built with the languag…

I'm on the same page with you that their AI stance is probably harmful for them -- but I think they wrote those as a reaction to the contributions from Bun and others. So your implied timeline is not entirely correct.
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