Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke • Hacker News Board

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

#401

Post by sufficientsoup » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:39 PM UTC

dcre wrote: post #311

embedding-shape wrote: post #4

> Management eagerly approved the Rust rewrite option because it was a great marketing opportunity to showcase their new Fable model, Anthropic already uses Rust, and Zig is openly against using Anthropic’s products. Yeah, don't discount how powerful "marketing" is to management/executives, and also don't discount how absolutely ridiculously petty people can be, especially people who end up like CEOs and similar, req…

I don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all. It seems much more plausible to me that Jarred just does what he wants. He has said as much.

Why take what he said at face value after "Calm down; this is just an experiment... but actually I'm gonna merge this huge thing in a week"?

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

#402

Post by hoppp » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

taude wrote: post #349

BetterThanSober wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much they spend on this rewrite, in tokens and $ using commercial pricing

it said in the original article on the bun rewrite ~165K.

For that money they could hire engineers to do it without having so many unsafe blocks.

The only gain is speed.

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

#403

Post by efficax » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

27183 wrote: post #259

manphone wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the same reason why everyone doesn’t wanna read LLM generated blog posts. The agreement used to be generally that you would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading and when the agreement changes the quality changes as well.

Writing is thinking. If you don't spend time writing, then you didn't spend time thinking. LLMs don't think. Consequently, if you outsourced your writing to an LLM the resulting artifact was born of a thoughtless process. Instead of engaging your readers in your thought process you're tricking them with a puzzle. Readers will try to understand what you're thinking about (at least the non-passive ones will). This acti…

writing is a form of thinking, but there are others

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

#404

Post by saghm » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

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?

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

I'm not convinced this explanation is self-evident enough to assert without any justification. I can think of at least one other plausible one, which is that maybe most side projects in general get abandoned after a certain amount of time, and being able to write the code a lot faster means that the point of diminishing returns for personal utility, enrichment, or pleasure are reached a lot faster.

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

#405

Post by ticulatedspline » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:42 PM UTC

A lot to unpack here, setting aside the drama I get a few takeaways:

- Your AI code is probably as good as your human user's skills and attention:

Seems pretty likely they were shying from style guides because the AI use was itself sloppy. I'm not a big AI user but if I just ask a chat model for some code it will give it to me, then I have to go over it and fix the code for our check-style. Without deliberately aligning all your AI use to enforce it style is hard to maintain. Existing lack of style was a technical debt they didn't want to pay.

- The most popular language is probably the best language:

I suspect the amount of training data on Rust is several orders of magnitude greater than Zig. I suspect they could have gotten there simply asking the LLM to rewrite the Zig thing in Zig, however I'm betting LLMs write much better rust code so why not take the opportunity to move to a language that will get all-around better results.

- Technical bankruptcy is more favorable than paying technical debt:

These migrations we're seeing seem to point to a future where it's simply easier to burn a code-base to the ground, take the test suite and re-implement rather than actually pay large amounts of technical debt. I think this is a pattern that will come up more often with heavily AI written codebases that become untenably noodley, or brittle.

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

#406

Post by Thanemate » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

999900000999 wrote: post #281

Every one feels a bit wrong here. Zig’s author, Andrew Kelley is out of line here. > We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices. There were a few exceptional heroes who did their very best in a dysfunctional company. You know who you are. But you can't stop a rising tide. https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht... So not only is Zig written by amateurs, but these a…

>As for actual coding… LLMs will always do better work in a well known stable language than something relatively new.

Say that louder for the people in the back, who still think that LLM companies don't influence the entire programming language and framework field, by merit of the fact that LLM's can only perform at scale after lots of training.

And when we reach the point where source code doesn't need to be read, said companies will vendor lock you even harder by marketing their own LLM-optimized language and framework, promising everything and the moon in terms of productivity gains. First class support was the reason they acquired Bun.

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

#407

Post by causal » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:45 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #301

hypfer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen. Rel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

It's funny, but I think the article is showing it's age. It's no longer true. In hindsight having automated auto complete rewriting your code base wasn't something on 2000's radar. Now switching from language to language is much easier. Just for Rust, there was Ladybird and Bun complete rewrite, that ran into zero things that Joel rallied about.

I think it was always hyperbolic to call rewrites the single greatest mistake (I can think of worse) but I think most of the wisdom still holds. And AI generated rewrites are arguably riskier because now NOBODY is familiar with the massive codebase.

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

#408

Post by skydhash » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

whizzter wrote: post #126

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.

It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen. What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lo…

I trust myself to write good code, but I’ve been under pressure to rush things and extra features in Java, C#, TypeScript are really great on those occasions. I love C and Perl, but as you say, there’s not a lot of safety harness. A lot of trust is required for those in a team.

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

#409

Post by robocat » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

neutronicus wrote: post #260

ACCount37 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not writing Zig off myself. I would prefer if it succeeded. But the outlook is: not good, in my eyes. Pre-2022, Zig was doing decently, but not particularly well. It didn't have Rust level of enthusiasts and ambassadors (love them or hate them, they did succeed in driving considerable Rust adoption), it didn't have a major corpo backing it, it had too much API instability to be truly relied on. Picking a stupid f…

A day or two ago someone posted about abandoning Haskell because compilation times had become a bottleneck with Agents. FWIW

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48859673

1 minute skim of that surfaces aviaviavi's comment on moving to Python not Rust:

  Main factors were (roughly in order):
  - None of us are experts in Rust, and we're all solid at Python.
  - Rust felt like an under-correction for what we wanted (get all friction in front of the LLM out of the way).
  - Our high-performance stuff is not being migrated at this time (Scarf Gateway), so we're just talking about basic CRUD backends here. Basically any language will work

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

#410

Post by cyberpunk » Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 1:46 PM UTC

Animats wrote: post #129

Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless. That's the sort of thing c2rust does - transpile to an low level language which is unsafe Rust with a set of functions that unsafely emulate C pointer semantics. You don't need an LLM for that. There's no point. It's not doing the job DARPA's TRACTOR program is trying to do - translate C to safe Rust. I've used c2rust. It works, but what you get out…

Isn’t the point that it doesn’t matter if humans can work on it, as long as the AIs can?