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

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

raymyers.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 862 posts

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

#411

Post by causal »

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…

That battle tested bit is so true, always was. It’s hard for engineers to admit their hard work is worthless until they have let other people use and shape it.

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

#412

Post by Xirdus »

pseudony wrote: post #336
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…

I program C for my day-job. I see Rust encroaching in proposed transitions. It may even happen. That said, it is a poor match for it compared to something like Zig (or Odin). It's hard to make the new Rust code use existing allocator abstractions (so now you have two systems doling out memory, how do you reliably free composite objects with memory from both? How do they share?) and you increasingly have to either aba…

If you literally want one and only one allocator instead of the Rust's built-in one, that's been supported for years[1]. Almost 8 years, to be precise. It's very easy to implement and works with the entire standard library and all its abstractions, and almost every 3rd party library will support it out of the box too (except the ones that go out of their way not to support it for some reason). Borrow checking and all the other safety features are still fully supported.

Now, mixing different allocators is a different beast, and much less supported. But it sounds like you are very much not interested in this use case, right?

[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/alloc/index.html

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

#413

Post by stingraycharles »

skilning wrote: post #324
woodruffw wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can quibble about the Bun post’s factual claims. But I don’t think the post was deceptive or dishonest in its claims. Like most technical writing, it represents a vantage point. As for ghosting in meetings: sure, that seems bad. I would also be upset if someone did that to me. But you can state that factually without making it into a personal attack. It would even be more convincing.

> Like most technical writing, I think you've missed the core thesis of the article. That post _wasn't_ technical writing. It was marketing disguised as technical writing.

It was way too technical to disqualify it as not being technical writing. Writing can serve multiple purposes.

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

#414

Post by throwwwll »

allknowingfrog wrote: post #386
Gigachad wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I’ve seen is there is literally no programmer smart and careful enough to never create a use after free or out of bounds read in a sufficiently complex codebase. The state of computer security has moved on from the old model of just patching bugs when you find them. To now where we need to systematically prevent them from happening to begin with.

Have you heard of TigerBeetle? Being smart enough doesn't seem to be the primary factor. It's about having a strategy and the discipline to follow it. No type system will ever free you from the burden of doing the actual engineering.

[dead]

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

#415

Post by Laurel1234 »

khalic wrote: post #105
Laurel1234 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? It's literally been a significant part of their marketing.

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

https://twitterwebviewer.com/?tweet=2048130059412844995

There's like a trillion more examples you can pick from, as we all know it's been a core part of their marketing.

> It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst

It is quite literally what they're CEO keeps claiming over and over, it does not get more cut and dry than that.

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

#416

Post by andsoitis »

mbesto wrote: post #344
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.

You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit. > would spend more time writing than I would have to spend reading To your point however, the reason people don't like AI generated blogs is because there is a explicit recognition that the author of the blog lacked effort . There is a visceral response for the reader about the social contract "if you didn't spend as much time as I did why shou…

> You can't unilaterally say all AI blogs are low quality. That's bullshit.

Can you point us to a single blog (or even blog post) that is generated by AI that is excellent quality? Or even average quality?

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

#417

Post by Cthulhu_ »

BetterThanSober wrote: post #271
sph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim. Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it. Speaking as th…

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

I wonder how much it costs them in the long run; the initial number mentioned seemed cheap enough (equivalent to 1-2 developers for a year - and I don't believe 1-2 developers could rewrite it in a year, for various reasons), but if it's a 1:1 "transpilation" to unsafe Rust... was it worth it? Will it be worth it in the long run?

But this is the longer running discourse about AI code's cost / benefit. I keep nagging my work's AI community to show me the numbers, so far nobody has been able to show an increase in productivity, quality, customer satisfaction, or company profits.

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

#418

Post by afavour »

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.

> Anthropic is not in the programming language market;

Did we just read the same blog post? I see no assertion in it that Anthropic is in the programming language market, rather that this rewrite was a marketing opportunity for them they were happy to lean into.

> For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.

The latter part of the post is much less about Anthropic and more about AI coding in general so I’d say it’s still very relevant to your interests.

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

#419

Post by UltraSane »

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…

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

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

#420

Post by [deleted] »

woodruffw wrote: post #28

I think like most people, I don’t have a problem with Andrew “calling a spade a spade,” even if I find his reasoning motivated. The bigger problem with the post is that it talks out of both ends of the mouth: it’s clearly meant as a personal attack, but also insists that it isn’t. When I read the post, my first thought was that I wouldn’t want to build things in Zig, because any technical decision I make, good or bad…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN