Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke(raymyers.org)

1554 points by crowdhailer 84 days ago | 785 comments

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 suites). Also:

"this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk"

How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something. As it is, the impressive bit is do such a big rewrite & result seems to work ok. Are Bun users happy with this?

To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Edit: and fwiw, I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this. It says nothing about how suitable Zig is or isn't for project xyz, and Zig community is big enough to carry their own project & applications besides Bun.

sph 84 days ago | |

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 the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

TeriyakiBomb 84 days ago | | |

A drum I've been banging increasingly often recently is that having friction and time to work ideas over in your mind adds huge amounts of value. Vibe coded projects have this very specific, well, vibe to them where you can clearly see that the lack of time to digest has allowed the person to not challenge their own worst impulses. You can see it in the feature bloat, the lack of depth and polish in core features and the wild asides you tend to talk yourself out of still on display.

deaux 84 days ago | | |

> I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

100%, you actually stated it correctly. It's not "I don't care unless you've written/reviewed everything by hand". If someone writes something by hand in an hour, including ideation, and puts it on Show HN, realistically it's almost certainly not going to be worth even looking at.

I've been running an app in prod for more than a year now, mostly vibecoded long before HN believed it was possible - HN only started believing this around Jan this year at the earliest. But nobody who uses it cares, or even notices, because it took a month to build. That's what matters, the amount of time and thought put into it. Of course it's true that vibecoded projects have a much lower median amount of time and thought put into it. But that's like Louisiana having a much lower median income than California, it's just a median, not an inherent characteristic of being a Louisianan vs a Californian, there are plenty of poorer Californians and richer Louisianans.

manphone 84 days ago | | |

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.

budsniffer952 84 days ago | | |

>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

Yes. I'm as pro-AI coding as people come, but this is the part that bugs me too. If you whip something useful up in a weekend, great!

But you don't have to present it like you are building an actual product. It's fine if no one else knows about it. Because the fact is, most people don't care, even before AI. Building for yourself is fine.

locknitpicker 84 days ago | | |

> They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

I think it's more than that. These greenfield projects are actually things that, up until the inception of LLMs, they were not worth creating.

With AI code assistants, the cost of developing them is lower, but in the end you still end up with a project that no one bothered to create.

ljm 84 days ago | | |

It's very strange to vibe code a project and feel both a lack of emotional investment but also the cognitive overhead of steering an AI.

The process of iteration, or the feedback loop, typically allows space to try things out and experiment and then either drop an idea or refine it more purposefully. And those breaks in between the pure delivery to focus on that gives you room to breathe and also see the progress of your work.

Blatting it out in 6 hours with Fable 5 skips all of that and you have something like an MVP, but you haven't really put anything of yourself into it. So why bother committing unless you can take that further or apply something novel or reflect your own personality in it? Or you genuinely believe you're on to something and the AI approach actually gave you a path to building it?

I've been 'vibe coding' something, I've spent about a month on it on and off along with a fair bit of debugging on some sticky issues. I still think I'd suffer going into that codebase and doing stuff in it by hand, no matter how well I thought I organised it all.

DonHopkins 84 days ago | | |

>Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

I dunno, this idea guy seems to have some really great ideas, what's wrong with you skeptical programmers who aren't on board implementing his ideas for equity?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q

throwatdem12311 84 days ago | | |

Maybe those ideas aren’t so brilliant.

BetterThanSober 84 days ago | | |

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

frou_dh 83 days ago | | |

Great point. It is simply lame impatient clout-chasing when someone goes out and promotes their project that is approximately as new to them as it is to the people they're promoting it to.

m4xp 84 days ago | | |

Keep in mind logic bug that ai makes are extremely hard and expensive to fix as the clanker needs to parse thousand and thousands of lines of text every prompt while a human tries to explain what it's obviously doing wrong.

I hate ai so much because its so easy to generate quick slop that "appears" functional.

crowdhailer 84 days ago | | |

Not heard sunk cost fallacy described as a feature before. Interesting idea.

petcat 84 days ago | |

> 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 because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

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.

shirol 84 days ago | | |

> 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...

pseudony 84 days ago | | |

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 abandon any actual benefits of the borrow-checker, or invest increasingly heavily into sufficiently fat bindings to wrap your existing C/C++ in a way where the borrow-checker can assist you. That's before we consider the complexity of the language - I'd doubt a seasoned C programmer has much trouble deciphering Zig or Odin FFI bindings, but in the case of Rust? Yes, there is real friction.

Also if you really value predictable- and higher performance, being in more in control of memory allocations and cleanup is preferable. This is the direction both Zig and Odin cater to.

If you asked me what solves the most issues without adding too many new liabilities, I'd say Zig (or Odin). It would simply be much, much easier to transition a C codebase to either, and either would bring a much improved stdlib with pluggable allocators capable of leak-detection etc.

p-e-w 84 days ago | | |

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

You hit the nail on the head there. Zig is 10 years old now and it’s pretty clear that the industry isn’t biting, compared to the behemoth that is Rust. Between Rust, C, and C++ there is very little room for another language with a woefully incomplete library ecosystem to establish itself.

A true competitor would need to offer genuine extra value, such as dependent types or other formal verification features, to carve out a niche.

alexrp 84 days ago | | |

> I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use

I promise you, hand on heart, that literally no one on the Zig core team is wasting their time on thoughts like this.

> and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

Quoting Andrew:

> So, when the Anthropic aquisition finally happened, we at ZSF breathed a sigh of relief. When the donation silently stopped, our bank account was ready for it. When they neither canceled their monthly meeting with us, nor showed up, we were not surprised. The relationship was over.

I advise you to take this paragraph at face value. Again, I promise you that it is the truth.

dnautics 84 days ago | | |

> the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C

I don't think anyone who actually uses zig thinks "it doesn't offer enough over C". Removing #define alone would have been worth it.

cfiggers 84 days ago | | |

I would say the flagship Zig project is TigerBeetle, not Bun.

ACCount37 84 days ago | | |

I used to think there's a good niche for "better C" - and that Zig was the one language angling for that. A language that can be used in the same contexts as C, to do the same things as C code, in very much the same way, but with some modern features, some stronger guarantees and some helpful syntactic sugar? A welcome thing for embedded development.

On the other end, Rust to me felt like "better C++" - outside the embedded niche, aimed at complex multithreaded code that has to combine high performance with not catching on fire because someone fucked up concurrency once again.

But the main issue I had with Rust - that it's frankly a bitch to write, nearing Go levels of awful, only worthwhile if its paradigm is buying you a lot - is diminished if it's an LLM that's doing the bulk of the line to line writing.

And, on the other end, C's warts, footguns and ancient quirks also matter less if you have an LLM plow through it.

So, the niche for Zig does seem to be shrinking. The window for it to establish itself might be genuinely closing now. Which is a shame, because I like the idea of having "better C" a lot. But all of this drama sure isn't helping it gain traction.

Tade0 84 days ago | | |

> So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

Huge problem with this is that typically safe, idiomatic Rust looks nothing like unsafe Rust.

neutronicus 84 days ago | | |

Yeah, I mean … as a C++ dev I have those same existential “what’s the point” questions about Zig.

herrkanin 84 days ago | |

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

petesergeant 84 days ago | | |

I would go further and say that anyone who doesn't immediately identify this either isn't thinking clearly about this, or is intentionally ignoring it. I have no horse in this race AT ALL and this is _obviously_ the advantage.

lunar_mycroft 84 days ago | | |

Except that writing safe rust often requires designing the architecture around rust's ownership model, meaning a file by file, line by line translation doesn't necessarily leave you much closer to safe rust than you were at the start.

cyber_kinetist 84 days ago | | |

> clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries

This is not done by blindly porting Zig code 1:1 and calling it a day. You do have to make conscious decisions about code architecture to manage Unsafe code, since you need choose the right invariants for your Safe Rust code to conform inside the module (Note that unsafe pollutes the whole module containing it, not just the code inside the unsafe block!)

sporkland 84 days ago | |

> There's so much good stuff in this post.

The post starts off so cynical. I know a few people at anthropic and oai and the simplest explanation also matches my observations that they actually believe what they say. That agents will be doing the bulk of the programming in the not so distant future. They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

nsagent 84 days ago | | |

Then they are naive. I've seen this a lot first hand during my PhD. Interpreting results in a way that reinforces their beliefs and ignores alternate hypotheses.

Frequently, those alternative hypotheses are demonstrated to be true. For example, "emergence" as was researched and proclaimed by many labs, including places like OpenAI and Anthropic is due to using too few discrete steps in sampling a continuous phenomenon. See "Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?" [1] for example.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004

afavour 84 days ago | | |

> I know a few people at anthropic and oai

> They aren't managing some message and trying to teach the anti AI folks a lesson.

Unless you know the senior execs in charge of marketing at these companies I don't know how you can make that assertion. I believe that a lot of the folks at these companies earnestly believe in the work they are doing. But a belief held by software engineers is not automatically shared by the marketing department, nor by senior execs.

"Anthropic is a giant company with a lot at stake and will seek to capitalize on any marketing opportunity" doesn't strike me as cynical so much as a statement of fact.

krater23 84 days ago | | |

I'm sure that Jehovah's Witnesses believe what they say. But thats not a reason to let them in my house.

twister2920 84 days ago | | |

> They believe they themselves will be out of jobs at that point.

now THAT is cynical

hinkley 84 days ago | |

But it’s really the same old problem we’ve seen for decades. Developers write code. Owners declare victory. Owners rid themselves of expensive opex. Owners sell the division or try to keep the project limping along but all they see is vaguaries from the new cheap guy who they keep telling isn’t good enough for a raise, company hemorrhages money and eventually sells for a song.

They’ve just found a way to explore that logical fallacy even faster.

nz 84 days ago | | |

Owners and developers. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Years ago, maybe in the late 2000s, when startups were becoming culturally significant, and "Tech" became an "Industry", two books were written and published: Founders at Work by Livingston, and Coders at Work by Seibel. I read both, and recall the Founders-book being a bit of a slog -- I only read it once[0]. The Coders-book, I have been re-reading it for more than a decade. I am sure there are many people who would express the _opposite_ sentiment.

The existence of _two_ books, published by the same publisher, within a few years of each other, is a kind of tacit acknowledgement, that there are two categories of people (Owners/Founders and Developers/Coders), that have a kind of symbiotic relationship with each other. That relationship has always been a relationship of convenience and gain, not resonance and understanding and appreciation.

It is, in a way, similar to globalization: nations will support it, only to the extent that it can make them (or their elites) wealthier, and not because they actually care about peace, or the magnificent diversity of human culture and creativity.

Just as the globalized economy is fraying, so is the symbiotic relationship between Founders and Coders. I think it started with the pandemic, which caused (without pointing any fingers) a tension between Founders and Coders, and has been accelerated by LLMs. In some sense, the tactics that were use by Tech companies to wow and win customers outside of Tech, are now being used by Tech companies on other Tech companies. And those tactics involve making grand promises to people who have knowledge-gaps, and are otherwise easily impressed.

I did not realize that there even was a symbiotic relationship, until I analyzed US degree-completion-rates for 1970 to 2011[1][2]. I suppose it should have been obvious, but these things are difficult to perceive from the inside (even if you've been working in the industry for an entire decade). The big problem is that the symbiosis is asymmetrical: founders get the money, and pay the coders, and are able to fire and replace coders at will, while coders can do none of this to the founders. This may have been fine, in an era where layoffs were rare, and getting a replacement job was less uncertain. But I suspect that the contest we are going to see in the next few years is: can Founders out-code Coders, or can Coders out-found Founders. Note that the Viaweb story (the archetypal startup-story for HN), is a story of Coders out-founding Founders (the equivalent of the late 90s era, did not found companies so much as administer small parts of them).

[0]: This is not a criticism of the author/interviewer, nor the interviewees -- the subject matter simply did not intersect enough with my own obsessions and fixations. I wish it did. It feels like I have some kind of color blindness, when it comes to "founder-y" things.

[1]: You can find a (fair warning: long) PDF here: https://galacticbeyond.com/pdf/two-percent-programmer.pdf

[2]: If you do not want to read all of that, here is a TLDR. The percentage of informatics-degree-completions never drops below 2% (which confirms an informal observation Knuth has made many times -- see his 3 or 4 oral histories and his interview in Coders at Work). The percentage of informatics-degree-completions rises and falls with business-degree-completions (the symbiosis is visible here). It never exceeds 4.5%, and such doublings coincide with bubbles (the dot-com bubble, and the 1980s AI-bubble -- there is a history section that helps narrate these numbers). Most intriguingly, informatics-degree-completions are _perfectly inversely correlated_ with healthcare-degree-completions -- their first-derivatives are nearly perfect mirror images. Also, the majority of graduates are business-graduates (accounting, administration, etc -- economics belongs to social-sciences instead of business), and their numbers have doubled since 1970, at the expense of social sciences and education (I suspect that this has had an impact on our (both global and American) culture akin to the impact that climate-change has had on our planet, but I have no data to put behind that suspicion, yet).

saghm 84 days ago | |

> 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.

lennxa 84 days ago | |

the rust is merged into main https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

and the rust version has been live in claude code since june 17th.

pizlonator 84 days ago | |

I read a decent chunk of the rewrite.

It’s inaccurate to call it a rewrite. It’s more a transliteration - it matches the original Zig almost exactly but the syntax is different.

And yeah, unsafe blocks anywhere that rust would have complained

So it’s highly likely that the “rewrite” is exactly as reliable as the original.

(It sure feels like this was done for Anthropic marketing reasons, the more I think about it.)

ksec 84 days ago | |

>I don't think Zig community should get triggered on any of this.

As far as I can tell No one from Zig community got triggered by this other than the Zig team. People were angry about Bun switching to Rust not because it is abandoning Zig, but this reckless behaviour of not letting users know up front, no migration path or two parallel version testing and basically trust AI on everything.

The internet was pretty much on Zig's side or at least between Bun and Zig they were Anti-Bun for a lot of things. That was until Zig's reply.

J_Shelby_J 84 days ago | | |

Agreed. That seemed to be the consensus in /r/rust

FeepingCreature 84 days ago | |

> Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

I'm gonna offer an alternate theory. Because AI-generated projects are so cheap, there's no need to amortize them by advertising and creating a community. It works for you, you don't change your workflow, so there's no need to expand it. In this model, most AI-generated projects are done within days, not abandoned.

hypfer 84 days ago | |

> 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-...

mekoka 84 days ago | | |

As entertaining as that article was when it came out, I think its apparent wisdom should have been reevaluated for at least the past two decades. Even back when it was written, its pertinence was questionable, since it hinged on the perception that written code has particular value, to justify much of the failures at Netscape and Borland, neglecting many of the other -- probably more relevant -- business and human factors that were at play within the two organizations and their surrounding ecosystems. But lessons learned from watching startups fail in trove in the following two decades have mooted many of Joel's arguments. With the vantage of hindsight, if you read JWZ's account of what went on at Netscape, some of the dysfunctions become glaring.

Making software projects successful has always been about a lot more than just writing code. People have been "rewriting code from scratch" successfully even before LLMs. We just don't tend to call it that. We call it "cloning", "competition", "copy", "alternative-to", "reverse-engineering", "x-written-in-language-y", etc.

Ygg2 84 days ago | | |

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.

Lerc 84 days ago | |

>Can't help to think of a recent HN post about most AI-generated projects being abandoned within months. Why?

Because most projects are abandoned within months. Why should they be any different in that respect?

pier25 84 days ago | |

> Are Bun users happy with this?

I've gone back to Node.

There was a poll on r/bun with about 2000 votes and only about 30% of users voting they were going to use the Rust version. Can't seem to find it now.

Edit:

The poll was deleted

https://www.reddit.com/r/bun/comments/1u3j4d7/are_you_going_...

mooreds 84 days ago | |

Yeah, I was just commenting on a LinkedIn post[0] (don't hate the player, hate the game :) ). In it, someone talked about the difference between creating software and owning it.

Creating software with AI is super easy--plan, prompt, test, go, go, go!

Owning software means you're responsible for maintaining it over time, fixing edge cases, operating it well, and more.

If you're building a one-off custom webapp to meet your needs, create away. If you're writing software for a business to run on, you're owning it. My fav article on this topic is this post[1] on durable vs disposable software.

0: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7482123...

1: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposable-code-is-here-to-sta...

waterTanuki 84 days ago | |

> 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 suites).

Not taking a side here in the whole Bun vs. ZSF dispute, but isn't the entire selling point of Rust that you get a bunch of battle-tested guarantees simply from compiling the program? Is there even a metric for battle-tested? I would say something like sqlite is battle tested vs a vibe-coded network server in c, but does that mean rewriting anything in rust truly mean starting all the way back at square one?

Also, didn't Anthropic roll out a version of CC using the Rust rewrite of bun? Surely they didn't just say "works on my machine" and chuck it into production?

simjnd 84 days ago | |

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X".

I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

busterarm 84 days ago | | |

Context matters. Big announcements and uninformed blog posts can kill your momentum.

I still remember the Twitter dev blog where they abandoned Ruby/Rails and the damage that did. It turned out Twitter was doing a lot of stupid things and there was a mismatch of tools and their goals. They loudly blamed the tools and people ate it up because Twitter was big, visible and adored at the time. Their conclusions bypassed most people’s ability to reason.

Anthropic/Bun are big, visible and adored…

joshgachnang 84 days ago | |

I've run into a bunch of segfaults in Bun whenever I went slightly off the beaten path, probably from the "horrifying" Zig code. A huge test suite + a clean rewrite with a path towards more safety is how I would go about it too, personally. Now whether I would do that rewrite in Zig or Rust, I'm not sure. But I have high hopes it's going to work a lot better, especially since Anthropic uses Bun heavily.

Are LLMs better at writing Rust than Zig? I'd assume so, there's way more Rust open source code than Zig. And if so, that's a very solid reason to switch IMO.

vga1 84 days ago | |

I think the mistake people are making currently is that they publicize stuff way too early. I.e. they make a prototype and then put that out there. Possibly with a full product page and all.

People did this also before LLM, but the difference is that now the prototype is a fully functional product in the technical sense whereas before it was little more than a glorified Hello World. The human effort and calendar time used remains roughly the same.

There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM, but it'll take some time. Not as long as it did before, but still significant time.

andsoitis 84 days ago | | |

> There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM

You think more amazing than what was made without LLM?

chuckadams 84 days ago | |

> To me it reads like Bun was forked. Will the Zig version survive? Will the Rust one? Both? All options ok.

Maintenance of the zig code was abandoned, while the port continued in the same repo, and it's unlikely any work on the zig branch will keep momentum. So yes it forked, but more in the fork+exec sense (or maybe just exec, the analogy's not that great).

ivanjermakov 84 days ago | | |

According to Andrew, bun-zig is not something some brave soul would be eager to maintain.

> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt.

Just "1MLOC JavaScriptCore wrapper" is enough to figure out why.

woodruffw 84 days ago |

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, might subject me to this kind of article from their BDFL. I can’t conceive of the leadership of the Python or Rust or any other community I’ve ever worked with doing something like that.

cropcirclbureau 84 days ago |

I stand with Andrew.

As someone who's been following Sumner's work closely for years, Kelley's accusations are very much true even if unkind. While the results are useful and cool, it a wankfluencer op from start to finish. I dare you to refute thus.

And I say all this as someone who does agentic development 8hrs a day and someone who always pestered my team to opt for Rust and Deno instead of Node. Call a spade a spade, the rewrite was poorly justified and one in a long lines of successful psyops Dario and co. cooked and delivered.

Now, would Andrew's message have been better received if it had better "decorum"? Maybe. But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts. You have to appreciate that.

vlaaad 84 days ago |

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.

jonkoops 84 days ago |

What I have been missing in all this debate is substance. I don't care that Bun was ported to Rust; I don't care that Andrew wrote a hit piece about it; I don't care that Anthropic sells shovels in the gold rush.

What I do care about is technical details. Jared shared some motivation as to why they ported to Rust, and I think they look valid (even if provided with sparse evidence). But I have not seen any sort of refutation from Andrew that these are not actually issues or how they should be solved in Zig canonically. I'd really like to see an exploration of these arguments, specifically pertaining to the Zig code as it was written for Bun.

jswny 84 days ago |

I agree with some of Kelley’s takes, but the issue is the tone.

Does anyone think that if Bun had been rewritten from Rust to Zig that a member of the Rust core team would have written a personal hit piece against Sumner (while pretending it isn’t a hit piece)? Probably not.

Kelley can write what he wants, but as the BDFL of a rising programming language, people are allowed to react if they don’t agree with the public image being portrayed by Zig.

embedding-shape 84 days ago |

> 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, requires a particular person. I can definitively see reason #1 and #3 from that to basically already set in stone that Bun had to be rewritten in Rust.

dcre 84 days ago | |

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.

FridgeSeal 84 days ago | | |

> don’t understand why anyone thinks management of any kind was involved in this at all

Because it’s marketing gold? Any marketer worth their salt would be super keen to get their claws into a project like this.

Anthropic and friends are in then business of selling LLM’s. This is a demonstration of LLM capability, they’d be foolish to not even try to cash in on it.

sufficientsoup 84 days ago | | |

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"?

shimman 84 days ago | | |

Devs need to start realize how people in power take advantage of them. If you already have a bright starry-eyed Peter Thiel acolyte, it's not hard to see how they can be taken advantage of. Especially when it's a multibillion dollar company that stands to give you literally multigenerational defining amount of wealth.

They hired them because they already agreed with them. Reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote during an interview:

> Marr: “How can you know I’m self-censoring?”

> Chomsky: “I’m not saying you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you say. But what I’m saying is if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”

simjnd 84 days ago |

Thank you. I was left confused after people praised the Bun to Rust blog post eventhough it contained very actual technical substance. No clear evaluation of options, very biased report on impact, missing figures. It absolutely didn't feel like an engineering blog post.

Maybe people were more interested in the agentic part more than the actual rationale for the port in the first place, because it was very disappointing from a technical standpoint.

cognitiveinline 84 days ago | |

>very actual technical substance

Did we read the same article? I mean it wasn't talking about a specific line of code, but it had deep architecture details, rational for memory safety and bugs, agentic coding patterns for scale. It was full of substance, multiple times.

simjnd 84 days ago | | |

I could point to the same examples this article refers to: the Bun blog post says "Having a rigid style guide [in Zig] with clear ownership expectations explicitly spelled out in the type system was a real option for Bun" and presents no technical reason why they didn't choose (or even TRY) that. They handwave it with "This is and ergonomic than the Zig we expect".

Why was it in their own words a real option? And why did they not go for it? This is the technical substance I'm looking for: an engineer explaining what options have been considered and what wanted and unwanted tradeoffs they present.

Also only mentioning figures for the platforms that saw an improvement is sketchy. "With ICU and code folding Windows and Linux get 20% smaller", what about macOS? Why did it not see the same gains? The fact that they don't mention it makes me think that they don't KNOW, and isn't confidence inspiring coming from the engineer who SHOULD know.

Havoc 84 days ago |

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

Kiro 84 days ago |

I really don't understand what Andrew Kelly hopes to achieve here. Even the non-programmers at r/programming who usually piles on any type of anti-AI posts called it out.

I'm trying to not let this affect my thoughts about Zig as a language but it's hard.

randusername 84 days ago | |

TFA has an odd perspective.

> Views are my own. I have no history with Zig. I’ve never spoken to Andrew Kelley

There are better primary sources to explain what ZSF is trying to achieve with its AI stance. Kelley's rant [0] was a bit much but the ZSF AI Policy [1] and Kelley's interview on it [2] are interesting and informative.

[0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

[1]: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqddnwKF8HQ

TonyAlicea10 84 days ago |

> It would be inconvenient if maintainability still mattered because their products default to making it worse.

I think this is the most important line from this piece.

Incentives matter. The AI companies are incentivized to have us believe that LLMs are the new compiler. That’s ridiculous (a coding LLM is a very very leaky abstraction) but I hear coders, especially coders with poor fundamentals, say it all the time.

This entire AI period has been a study in marketing disguised as futurism.

I say this as one who uses and teaches AI. What fantastic, amazing, unreliable tools. Extraordinary in the right hands, but engines of cognitive and technical debt.

VBprogrammer 84 days ago |

I think the only point that matters is that having Anthropic owning a project which is written in a programming language where the community (or at least the leaders of it) have come out as openly hostile to AI generated code is a clear conflict of interest. I think Andrew Kelley might have been better to say just that and leave it - the comments about Bun's founders energy and motivations don't really add anything worth adding in my opinion.

randusername 84 days ago | |

Yeah, hard to imagine opposing AI absolutists settling their differences.

IMO all the technical arguments and attacks are post-rationalization; different orgs, different contexts, different goals.

I think Kelley saw this, but couldn't resist muddying his point. I give him a pass. The rant [0] is too much, but the addendum about moving on is healthy, and I'd rather the BDFL be too spicy than not spicy enough.

[0]: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

JuniperMesos 84 days ago |

> From my perspective, Anthropic is the party we need to hold accountable here.

It's insane that Ray Myers thinks that Anthropic did anything related to this port that requires holding them accountable; the fact that he used those words makes me want to prevent him from having any influence over AI policy.

LtWorf 84 days ago | |

Funding and owning something makes you accountable yes, that's how it works normally.

slopinthebag 84 days ago | | |

For what, rewriting an open source project in a new language? It’s insane that in 2026 this is seen as controversial.

nicce 84 days ago | | |

Also pushing it for marketing purposes and giving free preview to Fable might contribute something.

TripolitianFish 84 days ago | | |

Inconceivable

drbscl 84 days ago |

The thing is, it's possible to call a spade a spade without resorting to ad hominem. Andrew's post would've been more effective if he focused more on the Rust port being for marketing, and the shortcomings of Bun's Zig implementation.

Instead, the first half of it solely consists of personal attacks.

999900000999 84 days ago |

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 amateurs also don’t know how to run a company?

Who is Andrew to say this, Oven got an exit. As far as their investors and owners are concerned that’s the only real reason to exist.

Assuming ( big assumption to be fair) all the early Bun employees got a fair amount of equity they’re all rich now. That’s a much better outcome than most startups.

At my first startup we had 6 day work weeks. I still remember staying up until 2 or 3am manually installing Postgres again and again. All we got was a paycheck. Although for me I went from a minimum wage earning college dropout to a 6 figure software engineer( at a new company).

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

I had to give up on trying to get LLMs to write working Haxe code. Haxe is too niche for LLMs to handle.

I personally can’t stand Rust, it feels like it’s designed for machines to write. Zig is designed for humans. Outside of a 200k+ job offer you won’t see me learning Rust.

Zig is rather pleasant. I can imagine writing a side project with it.

Finally, my QA background is screaming in rage. You expect me to trust a project that you basically vibe coded in a week as a key part of my workflow?

You know it works because the automated tests ( which I guess you also vibe coded) pass ?

By that logic say I don’t like Rust, can I spend a few thousand in Fable tokens and ship DinnerRoll( Bun in D).

Is that enough to raise a VC round?

overgard 84 days ago |

I'm not involved in this community, but I watched Andrew's interview with JetBrains a few weeks ago and I was really impressed. I don't currently have a project that would benefit from zig, but it's a language I want to explore when I have a good use case for it. I view his take as blunt but entirely reasonable.

Bun's rewrite has made me nervous about using it. I do have a project that would theoretically benefit from it, but that amount of vibe coding just makes me nervous. I'm not saying I'd never use it, but personally I'd rather wait for the dust to settle on it a bit. I feel like rewriting to a new language is going to be buggy no matter what (even if the tests pass), but an AI rewrite in a very short time makes me extra concerned. Just my 2 cents.

Also, one thing I want to highlight in the article because I agree hard with it:

> My advice? Don’t work for people that brag about 90 hour weeks. Work for people who will defend your ability to sleep at night.

I used to work in the games industry, where crunch was the norm, and I don't think crunching really helped at all past a couple weeks. I'm not particularly old (early 40s), but my performance falls off a cliff if I sleep poorly or don't practice self care. To me, people working ultra-long hours for marathon periods of time are making a grave mistake. It usually ends up being productivity theater rather than real productivity. Taking care of yourself is really important for being productive.

ozozozd 84 days ago | |

If left to my own devices, I can code 12-16 hour days. Have a crash day every 4-5 days, and then go back. It would be extremely unwise to merge even half of that stuff. I would frequently throw it away. Even before AI. It would be extremely naive to think that I am productive/efficient or responsible or a hard-worker for doing this.

Hey, I can party the way I like to party.

(I am old enough to catch myself and stop this cycle now)

Edit: I was super impressed with him in the first 10 minutes. It’s very Knuth-like to create a programming language because you had trouble building an audio system.

akshaydeshraj 84 days ago |

| how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free)

This, I don't think enough people pointed this out. We have been sold the "coding is solved" and "software engineering is over" shit by Anthropic folks for a while now. The discourse should have revolved around claude's capabilities and instead it became a Jared vs Andrew thing.

sajithdilshan 84 days ago |

I really don't understand what's the big deal here. Anthropic converted Bun from Zig to Rust using Fable and used that for marketing, but do people blindly trust them? Also isn't Zig still unstable and from that perspective regardless of how they did it, wouldn't it make sense to migrate it to a stable language?

coldtea 84 days ago | |

> but do people blindly trust them

Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

ksec 84 days ago | | |

>Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.

Judging from the HN comments in the past on Bun's rewrite. I wouldn't even use the word "many". It was literally all Anti-AI comments and reckless engineering behaviour complain.

sajithdilshan 84 days ago | | |

Then that's their own fault. Nothing to do with Anthropic, it could have been any other company putting out marketing material and people blindly trust them.

krupan 84 days ago | |

It's a big precisely because so many people are blindly trusting AI company marketing. It blows my mind how many people, especially here on once-subversive hacker news, are not just swallowing the marketing but they are doing the marketing for these companies for free. That's why it needs to be talked about!

wolttam 84 days ago |

Andrew may be a little bit grating to some (including me at times), but I value the perspectives that he brings.

There is a lot of discussion about the exact tone and phrasing, etc, of Andrew's post. There's something there - we expect perfectly composed writing, never getting emotional, never saying how we actually feel about a specific individual's behaviour. Meanwhile, in private, we often let those emotions fly, name names, etc.

I think Andrew gave us an actual look into how he feels about Jarred -- ambivalent, largely.

virajk_31 84 days ago |

Anthropic migrated Bun from Zig to Rust, they probably tried writing it in Zig using AI and ran into issues because there isn't enough Zig training data. A year ago, most LLMs couldn' t code reliably in Rust, But were fluent in Python, C, and web tech.

sublinear 84 days ago | |

Nobody and nothing is fluent is "web tech"!

virajk_31 84 days ago | | |

web tech - HTML, CSS, JS, and based/derived frameworks

Keyframe 84 days ago |

Sarcasm hat on - You know what, if LLMs were so infallible at coding and engineers useless for hands-on, then why even bother with anything except asm or even skip the mnemonics completely and go straight for the binary? Why even bother with abstract code when abstraction is now your LLM.

15155 84 days ago | |

Because underneath the code you have more than one architecture to support.

Keyframe 84 days ago | | |

if LLM is your abstraction - you give it a task to produce multiple targets. EASY PEASY, next!

mawadev 84 days ago |

There are a lot of posts going on, but let me just post this link to a specific file of the bun zig code base so you can have your own impression:

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/blob/bun-v1.1.42/src/bundler/...

My take is they vibe coded too close to the sun

bel8 84 days ago | |

I'm left with a good impression.

Lot's of comments on the whys and historic context.

Backed by tons of tests.

Yes the file could use some modularisation and splitting into smaller parts but maybe the gains were weighted and judged against.

That file is a great example of KISS.

bergheim 84 days ago |

what I don't understand is, given the anthropic narrative, why on earth rewrite bun to rust, and not claude code to rust? why use typescript at all when the whole point is that languages don't matter anymore? I suppose it is solely because it would be a bad look on them to rewrite claude itself - it means they failed - but rewriting bun is a much better narrative - claude is fine! it's just his runtime we need fixing. and here is that token heavy story!

so weird people are not commenting on this.

it's like.. I dunno, rewrite linux in rust, because bun uses glibc, this will somehow make it better, so claude code somehow can run better?

hell, start with UEFI.

mawadev 84 days ago | |

I think this post completely destroyed anthropics narrative

softwaredoug 84 days ago | |

Probably because agents in typescript don't waste time reasoning about so many different problems that come up in a lower level language. They stay higher level, and don't waste context on thinking about borrow checking, like you would in Rust.

jeremyjh 84 days ago |

This paragraph is written by AI. I did not notice it earlier in the piece:

> The piece about the migration process is very cool, with details that are reusable. No complaints, I think that’s the real contribution here. I particularly like the honesty in explaining that this was a port to unsafe Rust, allowing a literal file-by-file migration to minimize risk, paving the way for redesign in future steps. That’s a sensible move explained well.

ozozozd 83 days ago | |

Pretty sure this section’s title was “Say something nice”

…he had to resort to AI for this part.

poncho_romero 84 days ago | |

Why would the author write this paragraph alone using AI?

jeremyjh 84 days ago | | |

I doubt that is what happened, but this is where I quit reading so I did not evaluate the rest of the article. I'm assuming the previous section was either largely written by hand or it was much more carefully edited.

jonplackett 84 days ago |

The thing is - is it a self fulfilling prophecy?

We already know junior hiring an are down. And how many people are now excited to learn to code compared to 5years ago?

How many of those excited people are ACTUALLY learning to code and not just learning to prompt?

LLMs/agents will take over (or at least dominate) software dev even if they don’t get any better because humans will just get old and there’ll be no new humans who know how to do it.

piokoch 84 days ago | |

Well, I see LLM coding capabilities as a great enabler for people who have some codeing-like skills or needs, but were not sufficiently skilled to do something more complicated. Think of people who are good at Excel, who use statistical tools like SAS, SPSS, other analytical software. Now they can ask LLM to create a Pandas/SAS lang script and do much more advanced stuff.

People who were in the marketing data analysis (like sentiment analysis) - 5 minutes and they have a code that uses Hugging Face model suited for sentiment analysis, zero-shot classification, etc. No need to pay for expensive online services or expensive NLP software. It's here for free or $20 a month.

Still, it does not mean you will be able to code database engine with LLM, application server, rewrite Django in Rust, etc. So software engineers still will be needed to do ambitious, complicated stuff.

So, I kind of see it backwards, real skills, like knowing algorithms, understanding performance (including hardware stuff like processor caches, etc.) will become needed, as other, simpler jobs that needed only a "coding monkey" will be gone.

We no longer need to dig ditches manually, we have machines for that, but the purpose of the ditches is still planned by man.

jonplackett 84 days ago | | |

If you push that ditch analogy though. Yeah we no longer dig ditches manually - but we also then all got overweight and weak because people aren’t doing any physical labour anymore. (Most people anyway)

And diggers absolutely do have a monopoly on digging ditches now.

I don’t see how someone learning to code now will ever be as good at coding as someone who learned before LLMs.

Just like right now no-one is gonna get better at digging ditches than people were before diggers - it just doesn’t make sense for someone to put the time and effort into that.

daedrdev 84 days ago | |

This is quite true. Also, there is no project you can make as a junior to demonstrate your unassisted competence because 10 other people used AI for a similar project

edude03 84 days ago |

Not to "glaze" the author as the kids say but this has to be one of the best written musings I've read on HN in a long time. I'm likely bias because it's written in "my style" but I feel like it's a rather fair and balanced approach to a nuanced and socially difficult topic.

nihsett 84 days ago |

Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

> Ray’s story: Faced with a legitimate challenge of memory bugs, there were several viable options. 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.

Kinda makes sense. They also tried to make a C compiler earlier in the year. Idk what happened to that.

I guess it's an experiment without much downside for Anthropic, if it works use it to make a point about AI assisted coding - if it doesn't bun users will learn a costly lesson but who cares, it will just be another case study to make their product better.

That said, I think it'd be great to see this actually work out.

alex_suzuki 84 days ago | |

> Zig creator's article seems to have changed? I don't remember the bottom bit being there when I read it a few days ago.

Yes, Andrew edited it. Diff here: https://github.com/andrewrk/andrewkelley.me/commit/8b86ac915...

ubedan 84 days ago |

I agree that both Andrew, and the author have numerous good points, and yet I see things differently.

- I too am a fan of Andrew, and Zig, although all of my future plans currently are tied to Rust.

- I think the crux is that we are talking about 2 Vibe-ish AI rewrites, one to Zig, and another to Rust. I believe the investment in both reasonably minimal beyond the cost of tokens.

- I think that more adherence to a Zig style guide would probably have been very beneficial to the final work product.

- I have high expectations that the Rust rewrite will yield a more stable work product out-of-the-box. I am looking forward to the post-analysis.

yearesadpeople 84 days ago |

Wow. Wonderful post; best read this year so far. Lots of gold in this one. I like the way the author slowly undressed the - social media influenced - hype to reveal both Anthropic and Bun as they are: awfully basic

ericyd 84 days ago |

By far the most satisfying piece I've read in this saga. Favorite line:

> I’m not the one saying that their environment resulted in a buggy unmaintainable mess, Bun is the one saying that.

felixgallo 84 days ago |

People have got to stop falling for exaggerated rage bait.

lstodd 84 days ago | |

But, but, how do we get to experience emotions otherwise? We have no life!

samuell 84 days ago |

> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

While this may be slightly overstated, my take on this is that AI progress should have us upgrade our view of the human brain rather than the opposite.

Wrote about it the other day:

https://livingsystems.substack.com/p/ai-progress-should-upgr...

buredoranna 84 days ago |

> we still need good judgement and communcation in deciding where to go

I want to emphatically endorse this statement.

This is where the human workload will shift to: making good decisions... understanding why one path is preferred over another. And collaborating and communicating in constructive ways. More to the point, humans excel at being able to recognize when a chosen path is no longer fruitful, or where a conversation devolves into the unproductive.

We are constantly making decisions based on tradeoffs. We choose one approach over another, not so much because our chosen path is obviously superior, but because the peril on our chosen path is preferential to the peril on a different path.

I have used ai to great utility in my design process, to help me understand the tradeoffs within any given endeavor, greatly helping in choosing which path to take.

Thus far, I haven't seen an AI which can unilaterally be relied up on to always effect "good judgement" for the work it is tasked with completing.

But once good judgement, and the correct path, is codified in markdown files, ai can be exceedingly efficient in carrying it out.

alloysmila 84 days ago |

I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved.

https://www.uber.com/us/en/blog/postgres-to-mysql-migration/

lelanthran 84 days ago | |

> I remember the uber db migration post and I can't help but wonder if the tone of these conversations would be different for bun if AI wasn't involved.

Another point of view is that, if AI wasn't available, pre-port Bun wouldn't have been such a total mess that even Fable couldn't unfuck it.

IOW, the Bun codebase was being vibed well before the port; if AI was not available, would Bun have been in such a poor state that a rewrite was even necessary?

khalic 84 days ago | |

The AI panic has infiltrated the space now, and it’s just as bad as the AI hype. Half formed ideas, emotional posts with personal attacks and arrogant language, exaggerated claims, posturing, etc.

In the meantime, most of us are just using whatever tools are at our disposal and minding our own business.

handoflixue 84 days ago |

"We wrap LLMs in Agent harnesses because AI isn’t enough."

This feels equivalent to saying you're not a real coder if you need a compiler to hold your hand. What, a human coder isn't enough?

Of course we're going to improve tools by building more tools on top of them. That's how we went from punch cards to assembly to high-level languages!

oblio 84 days ago | |

Anthropic isn't selling that, that's the point. Anthropic is selling "coding is solved", worth $1tn.

If they keep hiring developers and LLMs need huge procedural harnesses, then the hypocrisy is open for all to see. And worse for them, it probably means their business model is worth maybe 5-10x what Jetbrains is worth, not $1tn.

BetterThanSober 84 days ago | | |

I agree that "coding" isn't solved but LLMs needing a harness is not necessarily a huge hit on AI

As for valuation, it's all a grift, always has been for anything hip in tech. SpaceX should've been in the $500b range and they have an actual rocket and working satellite constellations

ozozozd 83 days ago | |

Umm, yeah.

Obviously the neckbeard who wrote C in vim and compiled when he is done is a better coder than the one who kept compiling and fixed issues when told by the compiler.

handoflixue 83 days ago | | |

The neckbeards that wrote C did so precisely because they saw how C was a better way to get things done, and they were probably the first people to start using compilers, because, again, they're the ones that built them.

The neckbeards that wrote C tend to view LLMs as the obvious next step, and a lot of them actively use them for hobby projects even if they're not quite "maintain the Linux Kernel" tier yet.

sire-vc 84 days ago |

The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person the less respect I have for temper tantrums such as these. Even if everything you say is correct, coming across as emotional and petty just does not help your case. This just makes Zig look like a zealot fighting a turf war rather than a serious ecosystem.

dogleash 84 days ago | |

> The more I interact with the real world and mature as a person

I don't think this statement has the effect you want it to have. You're not laying out the experience you're speaking from. You're just setting it up so that no matter how reasonable the next thing you say is, it will appear maximally arrogant and condescending.

bel8 84 days ago | | |

I disagree. It's fine to contextualise that an opinion solidifies over time.

And your parent is right to point out that emotionally loading posts tend to be a disservice to the message being carried.

TheRealDunkirk 84 days ago | |

Good grief! I can count at least 6 logical fallacies in your 3 sentences.

blacksqr 84 days ago |

I have found myself wondering a lot lately about the alternative universe where all the effort and resources devoted to developing and using AI coding and debugging agents were instead simply dedicated to fuzzing human-generated code. How would the code quality and total usefulness of the results have compared?

ozgrakkurt 84 days ago | |

It should have been possible to build a new LLVM alternative, a new chromium like browser and some other similar things imo and that would have been definitely more impactful for me.

It is unimaginable how many static analysis tools or fuzzers could have been created with a fraction of LLM investment too.

For example honggfuzz was created by a single engineer possibly in less than a years’s worth time

throwa356262 84 days ago |

I think Anthropic is putting too much time and energy into marketing (and politics) while competitors are catching up on the engineering side.

But what do I know, maybe your CTO bought this and now wants to fire half of the dev team and use Claude to convert your COBOL codebase to Rust...

adamddev1 84 days ago |

In this whole discussion of what can be done with AI, I think a lot of people are missing the distinction between:

A. making consumer end-user apps, basic enterprise applications (making end products)

B. making tooling, libraries, languages (making things people build on top of)

What is the "software engineering" that AI will replace? A? Or both A and B?

Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites, does NOT meant that therefore people can get away with doing all software engineering with AI. B products require a whole other level of quality, stability, and extensibility.

I'm not saying doing A with AI is a good idea either, I just think that it's a fallacy to say that because you can do A with AI, you can do B.

skydhash 84 days ago | |

> Just because people can get away with using AI to make A apps that are "good enough" or pass test suites

That requires some proof, because the trend is that users of A apps dislike the lack of engineering that comes with AI involvement.

adamddev1 84 days ago | | |

Yes, I agree. I'm just trying to be charitable for the sake of the argument. I think it's better to make nothing with AI.

goofy_lemur 83 days ago |

All right there is so much hate for this rust rewrite, but I'm going to tell everybody that people are way way underestimating how sucky the Zig codebase was.

Basically all the time people were having horrid memory leaks and stuff that they couldn't even figure out.

So yeah, I get it, people are frustrated, but stop pretending Bun was this battle tested mature thing. It was a prototype, and still is.

Switching it to Rust is understandable since they just couldn't fix the memory leaks. It was and still is in beta, because anything with memory leaks is beta.

So yeah, I understand the concern but nobody would ever use it in production anyways for a server now because of the leaks so treat it like what it is - beta software and a cool experiment.

Thanks all!

aavshr 84 days ago |

I think Zig being a new and a low-resource language (not enough training data) is also one of the reasons Bun decided to use Rust as large language models will simply not be as good no matter how good the model is.

ACCount37 84 days ago | |

My experience was that LLMs performed at Zig and Rust at about the same level? That is: worse than at something like JS or C or Python, but well enough to write code that works. And they only got better since I first tried them.

Intuitively, Rust would perform worse because ownership is a different paradigm, while Zig is far more similar to things like C/C++. But I guess that's canceled out by the disparity in the language resource base.

jeswin 84 days ago |

Anything that can be written in Rust will be written in Rust.

I'm using Rust as a placeholder for a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics. It may not be a good thing, but there's no way around it.

karahime 84 days ago | |

If we expand the placeholder, I think "Anything that can be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics will be rewritten in a language with excellent performance and safety characteristics" is a desirable state of affairs.

TacticalCoder 84 days ago |

BTW a quick question...

Isn't it a case of "SVN trying to be CVS done right", as Linus Torvalds famously explained during his talk about Git at Google: SVN was doomed from the start because it's not possible to do CVS right.

Is this Typescript Zig any good? (don't know anything about it) Is it even worth porting to another language?

And why not an entirely new project? Ain't it an admission of failure of LLMs at writing new code? (porting ain't the same thing at all as writing a new project)

No dig at Zig: I just want to know if it's not yet another turd of the extremely turdy JS ecosystem.

CamouflagedKiwi 84 days ago |

Interesting article, seems more balanced than Andrew Kelley's one that it links to.

The thing I still think is wrong: why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust? Why not rewrite Claude Code itself in Rust (or Go or whatever, lots of options there) and drop Bun completely. That actually seems like an easier solution (rather than having to create a performant, correct Javascript runtime, just rewrite your CLI console app in something else) and the final result is better (smaller and faster) although likely not on the most critical axes for them.

andriy_koval 84 days ago | |

> why are Anthropic rewriting a Javascript runtime from Zig to Rust?

there is a chance they tried..

Animats 84 days ago |

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 is like compiler output, not something you can work on.

Aurornis 84 days ago | |

> Oh, they're converting Bun to unsafe rust. That's easy, but useless.

You really need to escape the Zig vs Rust language wars bubble to get a real read on what Bun was doing.

They started by attempting a more direct translation. Not quite transliteration but close. At this stage they wanted to bootstrap the codebase into Rust as quickly as possible using parallel agent sessions, which requires minimizing the number of refactors that cut across the codebase. After it was bootstrapped into Rust they continued on the rewrite to take advantage of Rust’s features.

The anti-Rust side has been clinging to that first step as evidence that it’s all broken, ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step.

The “unsafe” part is also confusing a lot of non-Rust devs who don’t understand that unsafe is used in cases of crossing FFI boundaries, which Bun does a lot of by nature

endospore 83 days ago | | |

> ignoring the fact that it was an intermediate step.

They are going to release the "intermediate step" with all its issues as v1.4. I think that says a lot about which party is ignoring facts. (hint: not me, not you, not Andrew)

> The “unsafe” part is also confusing

They are right in this case. The code base contains thousands of the most unsafe unsafe blocks I've ever seen in Rust.

cyberpunk 84 days ago | |

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

15155 84 days ago | |

> That's easy, but useless

The Rust toolchain is a delight in comparison to Zig's, and the unsafe code only need be temporary until humans (or, gasp, AI) address each class of underlying issue.

This is a no-worse-off state to improve from.

devinodowd 84 days ago |

Great Article. I appreciate the amount of detail you went into here to give everyone a fair hearing. Will there be a recording of your talk at the software should work conference next week? Thanks!

segmondy 84 days ago |

if I had to pick a side, I would pick Andrew but I don't think his side matters as much. IMO, it doesn't matter the technical reason why Jared ported Bun, it's his project, his wanting to do so is enough. I think the issue is that Jared turned it into a technical subtle reason of why "Zig is bad" without meaning to, and Andrew goes on the defense.

All that said, the coolest thing is that Jared did so, I don't care if it came out a bit worse with Rust, the interesting thing is here is what can be done with AI/LLM/Agents today. Yes, it might be worse, but on a reasonable enough timeline, it will get better. Folks get upset about these things. I did AOC in 2024 with LLM, my goal was not to top the leaderboard, but to see how good LOCAL LLMs could keep up. I did it with Qwen2.5-Coder-32B locally, and solved about 50%. Folks were often upset when I shared that, called it cheating, etc, even tho I often started about 8hrs after the competition due to timezone. It was so good, I suspected the cloud models would probably solve 75-80% and I concluded after my experiment that in 2025, LLM can solve it 100%. I didn't bother to try and the models were an order or magnitude better locally.

No matter the take on AI, they are very capable tools and we are only beginning to figure out how they can be used. I don't think we should stop, surely it's frightening on what that would mean if it can really "takeoff". This fight is multi layered, Zig vs Rust, Writing good code vs bad code, having good development standard vs not, being honest and transparent in technical disclosure, attacking Zig vs attacking Jared, AI good vs AI not, etc.

My_Name 84 days ago |

I think I got all the information I need to be able to judge that article from seeing that the author calls themselves a "Retrofuturist Software Mender".

cgannett 84 days ago |

"A lot of reasonably good coders have never seen an example of a good manager, and have all kinds of weird ideas about what management is."

Banger of a quote that one.

doug_durham 84 days ago |

I don't agree that Anthropic's position is AI is all you need. My interpretation is that it's about developer acceleration. I've been following their messaging closely and it's not that you can fire all of your developers. It's mostly their developers saying they are somewhat more productive. They have published papers showing that productivity gains are uneven.

blastonico 84 days ago |

There are billions of lines of garbage code out there written in C, C++, Java, you name it. So much garbage, it has driven people to create languages with tighter guardrails to help programmers.

Yet, I've never seen those language creators blame anyone else. I don't recall Bjarne Stroustrup lashing out at people migrating from C++ to Java, Rust, or anything else.

Maybe humility is just a generational thing.

scotty79 84 days ago |

> The Bun code is a mess because of their engineering decisions, including overusing AI agents to write and review everything.

Life would be paradise if people were just good for each other. They are not though. So you need a system for that case. Rust is a system that fits the modern real world software development dynamics than Zig.

ChrisArchitect 84 days ago |

My thoughts on the Bun Rust rewrite

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48843352

Rewriting Bun in Rust

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837877

ashishb 84 days ago |

Languages do matter.

And I think the only sensible backend languages when starting a new for-profit project is Python, Go, and Rust for 99% use-cases.

In other cases, third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry starts to suffer.

coldtea 84 days ago | |

Keeping it to the most mainstream, Java is a mighty fine choice as well, with even better options for third-party packages, tooling, integrations, and telemetry than most of the above.

ashishb 84 days ago | | |

I think most organizations don't want to increase their Java usage.

And the reason is not technical. Technically, it is a great language.

Legally, it feels risky to most.

bel8 84 days ago | |

I think Odin's batteries included approach have a chance to achieve escape velocity.

Specially if their community and their BDFL continues to be welcoming and fun to interact with.

Their 1.0 roadmap announcement is cool: https://youtu.be/dLPAqXi9In0

Here's most of the language in a single demo file: https://odin-lang.org/docs/demo/

well_ackshually 84 days ago | |

Forgetting the JVM when it provides absurdly good performance and more packages than pretty much all three of these languages combined is certainly a choice. Even Java and all its verbosity gets fixed by not having to write it manually. Kotlin is also a very viable option. Scala if you're a bit crazy.

rafterydj 84 days ago | | |

Most of the people I've encountered that use Java are working on enterprise codebases that are a couple decades old at this point. And I'm totally unfamiliar, but I thought Kotlin was vaguely "Java for Android" - other than existing packages, are there other reasons to choose languages focused on the JVM?

Ampersander 84 days ago | |

Why would you need any of those listed capabilities these days? Just generate them with 100x AGI

small_model 84 days ago |

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.

krupan 84 days ago | |

I love how many people are tech prophets now

small_model 84 days ago | | |

Do think the majority of SWEs will be hand cranking out code like it's 1999 in a few years?

upmind 84 days ago |

Andrew Kelley's thoughts on Jared Sumner is insanely savage.

crowdhailer 84 days ago | |

But fair?

soupape34 84 days ago |

Interesting thread. On the verification side — do you think formal methods or fuzzing scales better for catching the class of bugs LLM-generated code introduces?

gstestaccount 83 days ago |

I wonder how AI is going to affect language development and discussions like this. Zig taking anti AI stance is commendable, but it’ll surely hurt adoption.

superloika 83 days ago |

Bravo for Andrew! We need strong leaders, not weak ones.

AbstractH24 83 days ago |

Like any hype cycle some of it is… hype

And like anything in the world things change.

So will there be change in the way we code? Certainly. Are some claims overstated? Certainly.

r2vcap 84 days ago |

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 language. Anthropic’s motives are clearly promotional, but even so, I would not choose Zig for any project.

dgellow 84 days ago | |

> 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.

It is useful, you just have different goals in mind than the Zig leadership. Zig shared their detailed reasoning for that decision, which is mostly about the development and protection of the community

Orygin 84 days ago | |

> If the project accepted AI-assisted contributions, this controversy might never have happened.

Had I given my wallet to the thief, this controversy (me getting stabbed) might never have happened.

This 100% was a way to getting back at Zig for not allowing their parent company's product, and a marketing move for Fable.

vga1 84 days ago | |

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.

r2vcap 84 days ago | | |

Nobody should feel insulted simply because a project decides to port its codebase to another language. It is a technical decision, not a personal attack.

Zig’s response has been a serious mistake. The TypeScript team ported the TypeScript compiler and language service from TypeScript to Go for TypeScript 7.0. Did anyone interpret that as the team insulting TypeScript itself? I certainly did not.

tipiirai 84 days ago |

> In the AI bubble, we are pressured to build things nobody wants, poorly. Pop the bubble.

I'm sooo waiting for this to happen. I miss the old times where simplicity, clarity, and good architecture mattered.

mtlynch 84 days ago |

One of the things I find so disappointing about Kelley's behavior here is that he falsely accused Jarred Sumner of lying about fuzzing Bun, and then when Sumner showed evidence[0] that they've been fuzzing Bun for months, Kelley just silently edited his post[1] to walk back the accusation and never apologized or admitted he was wrong.

I commented on Mastodon[2] to point out to Kelley that it's dishonest to silently remove the accusation, as so many people were already talking about it, and it confuses the conversation if Kelley retroactively edits it, and he replied[3]:

> the false claim is in the bun blog post not mine. I only changed the text because it's easy to lazily argue against it. Please read more carefully. They are the ones being deceitful not me.

Loris Cro, Zig's VP of Community, gave a slightly clearer response[4]:

> Jarred's post has a section about what they "were already doing" to maintain their Zig codebase, which includes "24/7 fuzzing", which will make the average reader assume that the codebase has been fuzzed thoroughly, while in reality it has been for, what, 2 months before the rewrite?

Even then, I find it so bizarre that Loris thinks that if someone says, "We've been fuzzing Bun," and shows evidence of months of fuzzing, then that person is lying because "We've been fuzzing Bun" somehow implies something longer than two months.

The duration is irrelevant. If you say you've been fuzzing it and you've fixed bugs that your fuzzer found, then clearly you're fuzzing. The Zig team doesn't get to arbitrarily move the goalposts of what "fuzzing" means.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845652

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854921

[2] https://m.mtlynch.io/@michael/116896188093796421

[3] https://mastodon.social/@andrewrk/116897155344411469

[4] https://hachyderm.io/@kristoff/116898483283387067

brainless 84 days ago |

"Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering" - good but are they the only ones? I do not like Anthropic after their recent locking mechanisms. I use opencode with GLM, Mimo, Qwen, and what not. I use Codex as well.

Anthropic does not need to tell me that much of software engineering is being re-written. In my opinion, the costs have crashed. I build commercial projects at 1/3rd my earlier costs. I started build everything I can in Rust and I am still doing that. My projects have only gotten more ambitious, latest being https://github.com/brainless/akar - a WIP, please don't scream at me.

Many folks have publicly said they want to keep AI agents away from their works. Good for them. I want to accelerate software engineering, something I have done passionately for 20 years, with all the agents I can use. And I make my own agents, constantly experimenting to push local llm based agents.

If engineers want to stay behind, good for them. Not everyone does. Andrew Kelly's post read like an attack, IMHO. But why care about me? I am just a farmer (https://www.instagram.com/curryhostel) who uses AI to now build ambitious software.

ticulatedspline 84 days ago |

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.

nurettin 83 days ago |

Anthropic should make their own language, and openai should follow suit.

cryo32 84 days ago |

Great article.

Makes me glad I still write C!

piker 84 days ago |

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).

fnands 84 days ago | |

Not a lot of it is unsafe, I think they said 4%?

It's practically impossible to write safe Rust when you are calling external libs written in C/C++, like they do for the Javascript engine.

piker 84 days ago | | |

Sure, but you cordon that stuff off into small, bounded unsafe surfaces. My bet is the new bun is a crashy pile of garbage if they've just translated Zig spaghetti into Rust unsafe spaghetti with an LLM. Hadn't occurred to me.

4% is a lot in my world.

kawogi 84 days ago | |

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 ...

piker 84 days ago | | |

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.

bigcityslider 84 days ago | |

Unsafe Rust makes me think they did this entirely because LLMs are better at Rust than at Zig, but let's see what happens next.

dwaltrip 84 days ago |

All I can say is... Wow, what a clusterfuck.

rajayonin 84 days ago |

> The marketing needed to focus on how their AI was powerful enough to do this rewrite (even though it was not powerful enough to catch a use-after-free).

ding ding ding!

finnthehuman 84 days ago |

> The hearsay is essentially repeating what was announced publicly. Their job listing might as well have said, “now seeking applicants for total shit show”. It’s bad form for us to say this out loud.

It's a good thing to point out these unspoken truths explicitly. As people internalize the norms that make it bad form, it becomes easy to skip the mental step of acknowledging the problem. Even internally. But that quiet acknowledgement is necessary to keep oneself sane. Without it, the best case is someone steers away without good reason, at worst it leads to experienced and expressed frustration that doesn't add up and can snowball into the wrong places.

IshKebab 84 days ago |

There's so much weaselling in this post. His suggested solution to Zig memory errors is to never dynamically allocate memory? I mean... come on.

He complains about the lack of motivational blog post until after the merge, but a) they aren't obliged to do that (where are all the "it's free so you can't complain" people now?), and b) they gave plenty of motivation in HN comments, the rewrite PR, etc.

I don't like the idea of AI slop code either but it seems to work at least reasonably well for porting from one language to another.

mdavid626 84 days ago |

Anyone still be able to trust Bun? It looks like piece of garbage to me. Doesn’t even offer much compared to node or deno.

bel8 84 days ago | |

Rust Bun has been running Claude for some time now.

I'd be inclined to trust production code in such a large usebase.

Mistletoe 84 days ago |

I can’t imagine working at a company called Oven and expecting it to be a good time.

bohrshaw 84 days ago |

daitangio 84 days ago |

Sometimes I suspect the rust-rewrite is just a way to advertise Claude Code power.

In all my professional carrier so far, a full rewrite without reason is a recipe for disaster, see

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

This Joel Sposky article is always my northstar when I have such "temptations". My 2 cents

skor 84 days ago |

hey, does anyone remember when Slack wanted to replace email?

ajpikul 83 days ago |

The only reason we're paying attention to this is because of the drama.

The fact that rust is likely more interesting than zig (which is also interesting) is indictated by community size (and other signs like linux kernel inclusion).

The fact that anthropic is very likely overselling their timeline and max-utility for an IPO is generally well accepted as well.

Also that us tech bros are somewhat annoying is also well understood.

But who doesn't love a good street fight?

zombot 84 days ago |

An excellent analysis. So the Bun rewrite story is full of contradictions, irrationality, and bullshit. Not that that's really a surprise at this point.

roncesvalles 84 days ago |

>We’re supposed to let the Tech Bros go on about how cutting corners is some genius productivity hack.

Vibecoding in a nutshell

LAC-Tech 84 days ago |

Agreed. The outrage around what Andrew said was performative and melodramatic. I remember the "no work-life balance if you work here" thing, and then I remember Bun's CEO last year complaining he might not be able to get H1Bs anymore...

And this whole thing reeked of a publicity stunt. Show people you can use $$$ of tokens to vibe code a refactor. The headline is how great anthropic - bun's owner - is.

cvanelteren 84 days ago |

Nice write-up!

fg137 84 days ago |

I have no beef in this flight -- I don't write Zig or Rust or use Bun (other than using Claude Code which runs on Bun, but that's an implementation detail that I don't care). But the more I look at this, the more I despise Anthropic and respect the Zig foundation. One is like "we can do whatever we want because WE HAVE MONEY, what can you do about it", the other looks at things from a engineering perspective.

It will be sad if everyone buys Anthropic's hype, forget the basic engineering principles in this industry and think that AI solves every problem. Fortunately lots of people don't.

onesandofgrain 84 days ago |

AI is still 95% useless. The Zig article is spot on

witx 84 days ago |

I'm with Andrew.

It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that, no way to attest the veracity of it.

khalic 84 days ago |

> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering

I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest

Laurel1234 84 days ago | |

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

khalic 84 days ago | | |

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

coldtea 84 days ago | |

Wat?

Anthropic leadership, including CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Boris Cherny, has declared that software engineering is dead or will become obsolete within 6 to 12 months due to AI automation.

Cherny states that at Anthropic, no code is manually written anymore, with engineers using Claude Code to generate 22–27 pull requests daily and AI agents operating in autonomous loops.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackboxAI_/comments/1qxhqry/anthro...

netdur 84 days ago |

very narrow vision, openai and anthropic realized what they have probably won’t lead to agi so they moved the goalposts to replacing jobs, programming just happened to be the easiest field because engineers are technical, willing to pay, and the input/output is relatively easy to measure, even that has problems though, a lot of managers are noticing that code generation is fast but actual production output doesn’t improve at the same rate, anthropic basically bootstrapped itself on coding and now they’re looking for higher paying fields that put less pressure on their servers

sublinear 84 days ago |

So much drama between all these completely irrelevant actors circling the drain.

Anthropic have lost their minds, and eventually a metric shit ton of money. Meanwhile, nobody uses Bun or Zig either. Rust continues to chug along very very slowly.

sarmadgulzar 84 days ago |

Writing the blog post took longer than the million line Rust rewrite. That is all someone with a few brain cells needs to understand what’s going on here.

bubblegumcrisis 84 days ago |

When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.

entrope 84 days ago | |

Probably just you. I use them somewhat frequently to make it clear where a set breaks down into alternatives or parallel factors. If there's a preface and trailer around a list of complex items, I think writing the list in one paragraph is often ambiguous and hard to follow. Using a bullet list within that kind of paragraph (IMO) makes it easier to follow what I think is important.

Ampersander 84 days ago | |

Well, yeah, most social media posts that contain a list or a table these days are ai slop.

shevy-java 84 days ago |

To me it seems as if the AI corporations declared war on software engineers in general. I understand that many software engineers have already been addicted to e. g. claude (look at github, you see tons of "co-authored" rubbishness here) but to me it is clear that the AI corporations also work against the humans here - this example of the creator of the zig language (which I don't use myself, as I dislike several design choices made) being harassed by Anthropic shows this clearly as well.

mannanj 84 days ago |

It's hardly really about Anthropic. It's about all the people who funded them, and other AI companies, who are on the campaign by funding Anthropic seeking to end a majority of life for most humans.

Because that's what it really appears to be about, preserving a rich man family's legacy so his children can live for another few generations before they over populate and humanity repeats the cycle of indefinite war, hoarding of resources, and killing to have more for yourself. I guess every rich, powerful generation though doesn't think that future will come now, so they keep manipulating their way to extracting more and more from people and stealing their way to the top.

When a majority of the population is sick, naive, and overstimulated its not hard to convince them with your propaganda that that you are on their side and that the sacrifices they make for your power are worth it. of course they don't see how their life spans, their deaths, etc were for you cause and not theirs.

baq 84 days ago |

This post is ultimately complaining about a build step consisting of an automatic translation from technically irrelevant language A to technically slightly less, but still substantially irrelevant language B.

I don't care what Anthropic says and what the CEOs buy, I care about my own output and the recent models give me 2x uplift easily, I'd say 10x in single digit percentage of the time and I know I'm not using them to their full potential. We're living in an era of mass produced software. You can still be an artisan in this era, but you have to be aware.

self_awareness 84 days ago |

Yeah, but argumenting that "Bun codebase is a mess" is anti-Zig in itself.

The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code. If Zig accepts bad code, but assumes people will have self-discipline to maintain it, how is that different from C?

C assumes good discipline, as well as C++. But it will happily accept bad code. So I'm not even sure what Zig is even improving on.

Rust was designed to answer this exact problem (among a few others of course).

So the argument "your code is fscking sheet" is very 1990's. In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.

// Lifetime-erasure helpers (RUST_PATTERNS.md §6/§18) — re-exported here so // crates that already depend on `bun_collections` (logger, css, js_parser, // crash_handler, watcher, http_types) can route the borrowck-dodge through // one centralised `unsafe fn` instead of open-coding the lifetime cast. pub use bun_ptr::{RawSlice, detach_lifetime, detach_ref};