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Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

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Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#81

Post by andai »

asah wrote: post #69
esperent wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said it's a median 85x speedup while maintaining byte for byte equivalence. If it wasn't agentic coding that got there, everyone would be singing praises about that.

I've stopped telling people when I use LLMs because they focus on that instead of the work itself.

I just watched a video by a guy who got cosmetic surgery done. He's getting roughly 10x more positive attention now. Unless he mentions the surgery, in which case a lot of people get upset.

I note an isomorphism there. If you use AI properly, you can do amazing things with it. But if you brag about it, that doesn't seem to produce positive results (and bragging and quality work appear to be inversely correlated).

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#82

Post by tjpnz »

ForHackernews wrote: post #71
tjpnz wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't all support the same rules (there's literally thousands of them), so it's quite common to run multiple linters against a project.

You'd be surprised, Ruff covers nearly everything: https://docs.astral.sh/ruff/rules/#pylint-pl I run Ruff + a type checker.

It covers a lot but in our situation we had to throw Flake8 into the mix to be fully compliant with our style guide (the industry I work in is stricter than most here). There were Ruff rules which would've worked in 95% of cases, but there was no scope for configuration to get it all the way there. Last I checked you also couldn't add your own rules.

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#83

Post by wosined »

This is an interesting use case of LLMs. I like it even though I am not very pro AI in general. Let humans write the program in a high level language and then compile it to a lower-level one using an LL compiler (large language compiler?).

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#84

Post by stratos123 »

worldsavior wrote: post #73

This project was created 6 months ago, and had been worked on for months with claude. I guess Fable existed 6 months ago and none of us knew about it...

The repo creation date is confusing but if you look at the actual commits, there's been 0 commits between repo creation on Dec 6 2025 and last week, after which it's all "Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5". So it's in fact all Fable, not Opus.

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#85

Post by andai »

psd1 wrote: post #26
voidUpdate wrote: post #15

Do you generally pylint an entire codebase at once though? Why not just the file you are actually working on? Based on the homeassistant results (10.3 hours to lint 17.5k files), it only takes about 2 seconds to pylint a file, which doesn't really feel like enough of a wait to need an entirely new linter

A delay of two seconds in my commit hook pushes my blood to the hydraulic pressure of a 70-ton digger.

In user experience land, 2000ms is not tiny, it's catastrophic.

In interactive software, a single dropped frame is noticeable and irritating. Programming is an interactive experience.

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#87

Post by DannyBee »

mohsen1 wrote: post #77

It's fascinating to read the comments here. The attitude is very strange to me. Writing software is not a sport that if you "cheat" using tools then your results are worthless. Results are speaking for themselves. Unless you can provide a failing test case that the software presented here fails at then your arguments for "how" it was made is moot. Fully agentic coding is working well for projects like this since no m…

Agreed

It reminds me very heavily of being on woodworking forums as ever more mass automation happened, and the infinite arguments around whether using power tools/CNC/etc was still "real woodworking".

Lots of previously "hand-crafted" industries have dealt with mass automation. Software is not the first or the last. Hand-wringing by practitioners will change nothing, as it did not for any other industry. The vast majority of customers only care about the results, not the means. While there are some in the high end commission world who care about the art form, this is very rare and not sustainable for the majority.

History says folks would be better off learning how folks survived and adapted in those industries, rather than trying to argue about how worthless or crappy the change is.

Hobby wise, sure, whatever, but as a business what happens is very clear

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#88

Post by torginus »

TheChaplain wrote: post #8

IMHO there is little point of these conversion projects. It screams of "look at me, see what I made" and when the attention goes down a little nothing was ever pushed to the repo ever again. Perhaps I am out of touch, but a project with author/s that have passion for every line, function and purpose, feels more real and worth my trust to spend time using it.

Also, I'd be interested in the quality of these Rust ports.

I have a friend who's an experienced Rust programmer, and he told me Rust ownership doesn't really lend itself well to rewriting mostly OOP code that was written without having strict ownership in mind, and such project often result on very ugly code full of Box, Rc, unwrap() etc, that majorly pollute the code, and basically mean that you abandon all the Rust-specific safety.

But getting rid of all of this usually requires a complex rethink on how the data actually flows through the application, and many 'rewrite in Rust' project even before AI tended not to bother with that.

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#89

Post by mohsen1 »

conartist6 wrote: post #79
the_duke wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making something 50-2000x faster is pointless? Besides that, Rust code is actually much easier to maintain , thanks to type system guarantees.

You can't get 2000x faster without actually eliminating some large percentage of the work, you just cannot. You have to find some way to get rid of 99.95% of the work you were doing. Usually those inflated numbers come from single-thread to multi-thread comparisons, where you can fudge as much as you want by adding more cores. They claim this is a single-core to single-core comparison, so basically that means they ha…

In the world of compilers there is a lot of wasted compute. In my project I'm also getting good results (for now on single files)

https://tsz.dev/benchmarks/micro

Re: Fable Converted Pylint to Rust

#90

Post by spicyusername »

mohsen1 wrote: post #77

It's fascinating to read the comments here. The attitude is very strange to me. Writing software is not a sport that if you "cheat" using tools then your results are worthless. Results are speaking for themselves. Unless you can provide a failing test case that the software presented here fails at then your arguments for "how" it was made is moot. Fully agentic coding is working well for projects like this since no m…

I think people will come around to accepting llm written code eventually, but it's hard having your entire career, and identity, upended overnight.

Many people, myself included, have come to define themselves by their coding skills. They've taken great pride in not just solving the problem, but solving it in an elegant or nice looking way. Crisp comments, nice spacing, clever abstractions.

In an age where an llm is better at scanning the code than you are, these things just do not matter anymore. Llms will be doing the debugging. Llms will be doing the writing. Llms will be doing the optimizing. And so all that matters is that llms can make sense of things. And they are much much better at making sense of things without the need for so many of the things that humans rely on as waypoints.

The skill is no longer writing the code. It's solving the problems. Maybe it always was.

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