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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That's such a bad take. You mention some good things they need to do but ignore the part that those are next steps and will take time.
You are acting like they need to complete everything at once...why?
Bun (rust) is not even released as stable yet and getting extensive usage on Claude code. They are making improvements and fixes. So what's the issue here?
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.
> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.
If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.
Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users
Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company.
Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). The implication is that Anthropic has a stake in Rust's success.
Also, to be kept in mind that devs advertising successfull rewrites often hide some aspects that are unfavorable to the narrative; typically, how bad was the code before the rewrite), although there are other (significant) aspects that have been omitted.
> Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
- Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards
- Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)
- When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig
- The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity
This is summarized at the end of the post:
> Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator. Such people might reasonably worry that might happen to them
As a matter of fact, I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This is undeserved though, and that's what Kelley explains.
There's definitely a personal attack somewhat, and this is addressed in the last (added later) section.
> I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post.
This doesn't even make any sense. The part that you're quoting[0], is Andrew commenting on the fallout from the blog post he made. How could you have thought something about a blog post that hadn't come out yet?
Also, if you are talkinga bout the post Jarred made, it was extremely charitable about zig: "Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig."
[0] "The other critical mistake I made with this post was failing to consider the rather obvious and important point that this might affect Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator."
Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite.
Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make them look better than they actually are, Zig being the source language, they are a collateral victim of that misleading advertisement. Of course it's unfair to them and of course they should highlight this.
Well, if your game would be one of very few AAA games written in Unity (actually, the only game written in Unity people reasonably familiar with the subject would be able to name off the top of their heads), things might look different...
It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this:
the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened.
We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.
> Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your workplace environment.
Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet. I'd say it'd be more like if you moved from Unity to Unreal and then Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so.
> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet
It is incredible isn't it.
"Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"
"The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective."
"at some point they would sell out (let's be honest, their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce from the get-go"
"he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset"
There is more but I'll stop quoting to not end up copying the whole thing.
...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so
I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
> I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea
I'm exactly the same person as you, yet I still think Zig's post wasn't a "hit piece" at all, at least how I understand that term to be. They outlined the history from their point of view, talked about what they didn't like with how Jarred acted and worked, said they were happy about them moving to Rust, then basically said "Good riddance".
Everything is so drama-amplified nowadays, nothing can just be "They're a different person, they work in a way I don't like, but I'm happy they found a better language, good riddance" and that's it, no, instead this is a "hit piece" "trying to assassinate someone's Good Character" and what not... It's so tiring.
And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works?
Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
> I talked to those who interviewed for a job at Oven. I talked to people who worked there. Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
Yeah, exact words you would expect from someone who is happy about a win-win situation.
Andrew is bitter (or something related) about this whole situation, that's no question, he writes it in his updated post (he doesn't say "bitter", but he speaks about unprocessed emotions).
People are entitled to their emotions. The question is whether the bitterness is warranted. I think it is.
Why not? Sharing your experience with working with people is fine, they're subjective opinions. Does this mean it's slander and/or a hit piece? Seemingly a lot of people would say so, personally I don't think people sharing those sort of experience publicly are doing so out of spite, some of us are just still used to the old-internet where you can share stuff like this in public, without getting piled on for not "thinking/writing the right way" or whatever people are complaining about.
It is in there nature. They (specially zig creator) were so jealous about about vlang getting traction and getting $800/month donations, they made it their core mission to attack vlang and spread hate.
Vlang is a ridiculous project that was entirely driven by hype that should have been easy for all to see straight through. It is ridiculous that it got $800/month with nothing to show for it. I haven't seen any hate spread for it by Zig.
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts?
Anthropic's posts were sanctimonious, self-serving, tone-concealed delegitimisation of Zig. Kelly's post was a strategically poor but sincere individual understandably frustrated at this concealed attack, expressing his honest feelings about the situation.
It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen.
What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while.
Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust).
The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs).
The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms.
If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle.
Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell.
And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem.
I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions.
I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.
The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite.
The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzzer that the Zig team suggested they use, not just the high level fuzzing they were doing)
For this kind of project I do think using Rust is a good idea. At the very least because a project like Bun probably can benefit from a more mature language.
But I also think Andrew’s perspective of this process has been essential to understand what happened here, and though he could have been nicer with his word selection in a couple of places (he doesn’t have the clout of Linus Torvalds to get away with it), what he wrote absolutely needed to be said. I find it annoying that people dismiss it as personal attacks. If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. It’s essential context for understanding what happened.
> If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks.
The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market
Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.
I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post.
If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.
> Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.
Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun.
The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from.
Zig -> Rust : "We had all these memory errors"
Rust -> Zig : "We had poor iteration due to compile times"
Java -> Anything : "Memory is at a premium when we're trying to run a fleet of agents"
Anything -> JS : "We wanted a single language to optimise our agents for"
> Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.
I mean, they did buy a JS runtime, so surely they must care more about JavaScript and TypeScript than other languages, right? Otherwise that move makes 0 sense.
Maybe this part from their marketing post about the acquisition is just a straight up lie I suppose?
> Together, we’ll keep making Bun the best JavaScript runtime for all developers [...]
> Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
Not sure; it has some elements of personal issues, but they're followed by a rationale from the author.
Honestly, seeing the project lead (Andrew Kelly) take a stand against poor engineering practices without any equivocation makes me more inclined to want to use Zig - their values (in this regard, at least) align with mine.
He also substantiates what many of us are saying to all these "Very Senior Chief Engineer with 40 years experience" who are boasting of 10x productivity: these people aren't reading the code they are generating, and were producing slop even without AI.
You mean Anthropic has no agenda on its own? That seems a very biased analysis here. The response by Zig could be flawed (speculation, I have not reached this conclusion yet) but I don't see how this offsets Anthropic wanting to promote its AI slop here in any way, shape or form.
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.
This is not just a random blog post or technical decision, it’s literally a trillion dollar company’s marketing department deciding to attack and slander Zig.
Insane that people + tokens are slobbering to rush to Clownthropic’s defense when the whole migration and subsequent blog post was just sour grapes about the Zig project’s no slop policy.
And this is a warning shot from Anthropic intended to have a chilling effect, we have tens of billions of dollars at our disposal and if you take any stance we don’t like that undermines our narrative we will fuck with your shit and throw billions of dollars of muscle at rewriting you or trying to make you irrelevant.
Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't?
I knew it was gonna happen at one point, guess I didn't believe it'd happen so soon, but I still can't believe that nowadays people make choices about what programming language to used based on what semi-celebrity they like the most, and it's all about emotional arguments. What happened and since when is this the way people make technical choices? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe.
You are reaching quite a bit, and misrepresenting too.
But it's actually as simple as: Jarred's post was mature and didn't throw shade; Andrew's threw quite a bit of it while insisting it did not.
I and many others don't want to be slandered or trash-talked if we moved away from a language we previously chose. That can and has had actual business impact on projects / companies in the past. So naturally, people will judge you if you cannot be mature when responding to an event that made some splash in the ecosystem.
(I also don’t have any opinions about micro-celebrities or whatever else. I don’t know Jarred or Andrew, and I have priors about JavaScript that in any other context would naturally bias me against Bun. But the Zig post’s flaws are, in my opinion, not ignorable.)
The technical content of the Andrew’s post didn’t leave me with a negative opinion. To quote my original comment:
> 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.
Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't?
Yes, on the one hand here's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and on the other hand here's my blog "embedding-shape is a stinky slop beginner shit show"
And yet you got a negative opinion of me from the "embedding-shape is a stinky slop hack beginner shit show" post rather than SICP? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe!
It's insane that you think there's any moral problem with using a LLM to rewrite a FOSS software project in another programming language, regardless of whether or not Anthropic employees are doing it. This is the kind of thing that every free software license worthy of the name allows and encourages anyone to do for any reason.
I didnt say that there was a moral or legal problem with rewriting FOSS in another language, I said that Anthropic doing so in this instance was a direct act of hostility aimed at chilling critical discourse about their products and marketing narrative, and I’m shocked at how many people (maybe) are rushing to their defense.
BTW the rhetorical device of misrepresenting what someone else says as something much weaker or incorrect and then arguing with that is usually called “strawmanning”. Just thought I’d point that out to you in case you weren’t conscious that this is what you’re doing.
Just for context, the person you're responding to works at a place that is a recipient of large donations from anthropic, so they might be less than objective.
I actually don’t work for the PSF, and have never received any money from the PSF. Thank you for imputing bias into my motives rather than responding to the comment, though.
> We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make.
Yes, “it could have been any other company”, but it wasn’t, it was this one. Had it been any other company, we’d be talking about that other company; because it was this one, we’re talking about this one.
My point is that the article starts with
> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering
But that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly. Why not just call it a bluff and move on rather than making a mountain out of molehill
I think two things can be true at once....It was obviously a great marketing story for anthropic but that doesn't automatically mean that engineering work had no value. Companies have always turned interesting technical projects into marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
If Sumner says today, "We do X," then Kelley can say, "Nine months ago, Sumner did not do X," and both can be correct. What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months 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
> 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.
"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.
I’m puzzled by how many people seem to be convinced (deluded?) into believing that their productivity has been multiplied and costs have become fractional to build things, why don’t I see any of that productivity gain or cost reduction out in the world? What has become cheaper or better engineered? If you believe posts like thsi, we should be living in a golden age of prosperity, when it seems that aside from getting better lots of products and companies seem to just be getting worse? Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?
A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself.
But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignoring what indies are saying.
I kind of disagree that asking for world changing results is setting the bar too high, people’s claims about their personal experience are that the world changing results are already here, productivity has been multiplied and costs have been reduced by some factor, and AFAICT everyone is using these tools, with many reporting a similar experience.
The fact that people’s personal experience using the tool don’t cohere with the impact the tool has had in the world to me doesn’t suggest a slippage between how long it takes for productivity multipliers to be felt, it suggests that these tools might actually be better at delivering the perception to the user (and where relevant, the user’s manager) of increased productivity while real productivity gains are lower, or maybe zero, or maybe negative in some cases.
The key word is "already". I myself absolutely expect world changing results. But that will need time. I can only say what I know. My own experiments in building nocodo, a coding agent are 12-13 years old. Pre-LLM. I used template based code generation and related ideas. Template processors and what not. nocodo.com is with me since 2013 maybe, you can verify.
I am a software engineer, most of my experiments are on GitHub. I would not have ventured into building the UI framework before LLMs.
And this is what bothers me - people are not looking at the generated software. Indies like us are experimenting like crazy. I live far outside the tech scene, in a small Himalayan village. But I resonate so much with the experiments, the methods, harness engineering and so many other topics. I see the benefits in how ambitious my projects are becoming.
I teach an online course on coding agents as a co-mentor. 600 young professionals join each month for a 2 week course. The joy of people, who did not know much technology, when they create a simple project management software by just typing English does not lie.
We used to write software in a very different manner. The entire mental paradigm has shifted. Many of my friends and acquaintances are on the fence, still! Some are internally giving up - unable to cope with this change. But the change is happening - the tooling is only going to get better.
> Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?
For the normal person, they now have more choice. To businesses it is an even more fierce competition. There is an illusion of productivity since everyone using LLMs can’t stop because their competitor is also moving faster with LLMs.
So everyone is so “productive” in “building” anything at the third of the cost, it also means that even the customers that the builders are selling to are also building their own solution themselves.
Customers turn into competitors faster and those in pure software are now making even less money. Except for companies in frontier AI, infrastructure and hardware.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code.
> In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees.
If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns.
IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class of errors". This means that while Rust prevents specific bugs, as a side-effect it will also prevent some correct code.
Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me.
The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.
It would be easier for you to argument that the user is expected to have discipline to NOT use "unsafe" keyword in all functions.
Because a lot of mechanisms actually still have guards in runtime. And using .clone() on Rc/Arc is actually the idiomatic/preferred way of evading the borrow checker if we can't design the data structure in a different way.
It's a big difference between cases when you need to spend brain energy to find ways to "out-smart" the compiler, and spend brain energy to "fit into the proper set of assumptions" of a programming language.
I disagree; Rust's type system, which supports pretty rich algebraic data types, makes it easier to specify the correct data model for your system than it would be in languages with simpler type systems like C or Python. The ability to define enum types with arbitrary shapes for each variant, and then match on them in code, allows programmers to build better, more-accurate abstractions and have less fear of screwing up and causing a logic bug.
In my experience, it absolutely does (at least if you use it idiomatically). Using the type system (esp. enums, Result and newtypes) makes a good bunch of invalid states irrepresentable.
This also helps to focus on the remaining things that could go wrong.
The integration of unit tests also lowers the barrier to just sprinkle some tests in, if you're unsure that you got an edge case right. Anf clippy (not stricly the language, but still kind of a core component) greaty helps to stay on the idiomatic track.
No silver bullet of course, but I never had so few runtime issues with any other programming language so far.
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
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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-...
That's such a bad take. You mention some good things they need to do but ignore the part that those are next steps and will take time.
You are acting like they need to complete everything at once...why?
Bun (rust) is not even released as stable yet and getting extensive usage on Claude code. They are making improvements and fixes. So what's the issue here?
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.
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.
> But I'm glad he stayed honest to himself instead and didn't have a PR team ghostwrite his thoughts.
If there's one thing I learned in this debacle is "I should spend 1-2 days and send to a close friend before hitting publish on a firey reply." The way Andrew rephrased the closing section is the kind of thing I should publish on the first edit in similar scenarios.
Unlikely a useful lesson here. If it would have been written as "political correct" version up to the point of not calling Jarred out at all would have missed the core message. The fact that it was written blunt is the reason it went viral.
I also don’t really like his closing section, it has a big “sorry but not sorry” feeling to it.
Watch out, a tech bro is going to quote the HN rules to you and say you're being a bad bad boy.
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts? Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users. Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
For context, I'm using Codex and have no interest in either Zig or Rust, so just observing this drama from the sidelines.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market; their post about rewriting Bun in Rust is full of technical details that led to improving the end product for their users
Anthropic absolutely is in the programming language market. If/since AI makes rewrites to certain languages relatively easy, a success story will tie the given language(s) to the given AI company.
Rust may have a tremendous success in the future, because it's much easier to write it with AI (ignoring for a moment whether that's really a good thing). The implication is that Anthropic has a stake in Rust's success.
Also, to be kept in mind that devs advertising successfull rewrites often hide some aspects that are unfavorable to the narrative; typically, how bad was the code before the rewrite), although there are other (significant) aspects that have been omitted.
> Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
I take you haven't read Andrew Kelley's article (here: https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...).
Summary:
- Jarred has written Bun with very bad engineering standards
- Jarred has managed public relations very poorly (e.g. ghosting the Zig foundation)
- When they rewrote the project to Rust, and described Zig as poor choice, there has been a negative fallout for Zig
- The ZSF is obviously upset because of the poor publicity
This is summarized at the end of the post:
> Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator. Such people might reasonably worry that might happen to them
As a matter of fact, I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post. This is undeserved though, and that's what Kelley explains.
There's definitely a personal attack somewhat, and this is addressed in the last (added later) section.
> I also believed the same after reading's Bun's post.
This doesn't even make any sense. The part that you're quoting[0], is Andrew commenting on the fallout from the blog post he made. How could you have thought something about a blog post that hadn't come out yet?
Also, if you are talkinga bout the post Jarred made, it was extremely charitable about zig: "Zig made Bun possible. I would never have been able to build this much in 1 year if it wasn't for Zig."
[0] "The other critical mistake I made with this post was failing to consider the rather obvious and important point that this might affect Zig users who knew next to none of these facts and have only the surface level understanding that an ex-Zig-user is getting trashed by the language creator."
Yeah, exactly. It's weird that Zig even responded to that. Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your codebase quality and workplace environment.
But that hit piece would be an answer to the (multi-billion dollar) studio saying how much better the result is after the rewrite to Unreal, except it's not because Unreal is better (which it could be btw, or not, or more probably it depends on the use case), it's because the studio worked hard to make it look better, which they could have done without the rewrite.
Anthropic does this to sell LLM rewrites and make them look better than they actually are, Zig being the source language, they are a collateral victim of that misleading advertisement. Of course it's unfair to them and of course they should highlight this.
If Unity had 2.5 users anyone had heard of before the switch you can see where the motivation might (at least emotionally) come from.
It's not really this though. It's about the leaving throwing misleading shade. Politely, of course.
Well, if your game would be one of very few AAA games written in Unity (actually, the only game written in Unity people reasonably familiar with the subject would be able to name off the top of their heads), things might look different...
It’s not weird considering what we’ve learned through this: the Zig project is driven by people with fragile emotions and egos who lash out at people personally when they feel threatened.
We’d like Zig to be a project with steady and technically driven leadership like Rust, but Kelley has made clear (many times) it’s more of an egoistic vanity project like Elm, designed to cater to the emotional needs of the BDFL.
Calling them egoistic is quite a claim - do you have facts to back that claim with?
Andrew Kelley described Github employees as 'monkeys' and 'losers'.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46065366
Yes, I’ll cite “the juicy grapevine” and that should be enough given the evidentiary standards people are setting here.
To me it seems the bun guys are those with fragile emotions (it's just that the more fragile quality of their code is more evident)
Ehr, they weren’t the ones personally attacking others in a public blog post, were they?
> Imagining that your studio switched from Unity to Unreal and Unity proceeded to release a hit piece attacking your workplace environment.
Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet. I'd say it'd be more like if you moved from Unity to Unreal and then Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so.
> Incredible the different takeaways people get from text content on the internet
It is incredible isn't it.
"Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs"
"The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective."
"at some point they would sell out (let's be honest, their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce from the get-go"
"he was essentially groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset"
There is more but I'll stop quoting to not end up copying the whole thing.
...Unity made a blog post saying they were happy about you moving to Unreal, publishing they think it'd be a win-win, then outlining why they think so
I mean, that makes it all sound very polite and dispassionate, but Andrew's piece was anything but. I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea. I changed my mind after reading the piece about the migration - it was very interesting and the process was obviously quite thoughtful. Andrew's piece made me want to take a shower afterwards.
> I have no dog in this fight, I don't use Zig, Rust, Bun or Claude, and initially I thought the bun rewrite sounded like a terrible idea
I'm exactly the same person as you, yet I still think Zig's post wasn't a "hit piece" at all, at least how I understand that term to be. They outlined the history from their point of view, talked about what they didn't like with how Jarred acted and worked, said they were happy about them moving to Rust, then basically said "Good riddance".
Everything is so drama-amplified nowadays, nothing can just be "They're a different person, they work in a way I don't like, but I'm happy they found a better language, good riddance" and that's it, no, instead this is a "hit piece" "trying to assassinate someone's Good Character" and what not... It's so tiring.
Here are the highlights of the supposed "they work in a way I don't like" disagreement:
> I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy"
> groomed from a young age into uncritically embracing the Silicon Valley mindset
> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show
> We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks
> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs
> While I resent Jarred for making Bun into an embarassment for Zig
And what is even the point of saying that Andrew dislikes how Jarred acts and works?
Let's say the supervisor wants you to write a new microservice. Do you refuse to do it because the supervisor smokes cigarettes and you're an anti-smoker? I think that if you have objections, you should refuse only on technical grounds, not personal.
> I talked to those who interviewed for a job at Oven. I talked to people who worked there. Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective
Yeah, exact words you would expect from someone who is happy about a win-win situation.
Andrew is bitter (or something related) about this whole situation, that's no question, he writes it in his updated post (he doesn't say "bitter", but he speaks about unprocessed emotions).
People are entitled to their emotions. The question is whether the bitterness is warranted. I think it is.
Why not? Sharing your experience with working with people is fine, they're subjective opinions. Does this mean it's slander and/or a hit piece? Seemingly a lot of people would say so, personally I don't think people sharing those sort of experience publicly are doing so out of spite, some of us are just still used to the old-internet where you can share stuff like this in public, without getting piled on for not "thinking/writing the right way" or whatever people are complaining about.
It is in there nature. They (specially zig creator) were so jealous about about vlang getting traction and getting $800/month donations, they made it their core mission to attack vlang and spread hate.
Vlang is a ridiculous project that was entirely driven by hype that should have been easy for all to see straight through. It is ridiculous that it got $800/month with nothing to show for it. I haven't seen any hate spread for it by Zig.
Did we read the same Anthropic and Andrew Kelly's posts?
Anthropic's posts were sanctimonious, self-serving, tone-concealed delegitimisation of Zig. Kelly's post was a strategically poor but sincere individual understandably frustrated at this concealed attack, expressing his honest feelings about the situation.
I'm a heavy Rust user who doesn't like Zig all that much.
I browsed through the Bun code following Kelly's post, and decided to have Codex replace all my Bun usage with Deno.
Did you use any specific tools, like ast-grep, or did it manual way?
Care to given an example of the egregious code that led to such a drastic personal shift?
It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen.
What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while.
Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust).
The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs).
The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms.
If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle.
Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell.
And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem.
I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions.
I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.
The results improving the end user experience didn’t have much to do with the rewrite. Improvements in binary size and speed could be had with similar efforts on the Zig codebase. They spent extra effort to get those metrics to look good to sell the rewrite.
The memory safety aspects could be discussed. Arguably they could have had equally good memory safety by employing AI, tests and fuzzing (the Zig integrated fuzzer that the Zig team suggested they use, not just the high level fuzzing they were doing)
For this kind of project I do think using Rust is a good idea. At the very least because a project like Bun probably can benefit from a more mature language.
But I also think Andrew’s perspective of this process has been essential to understand what happened here, and though he could have been nicer with his word selection in a couple of places (he doesn’t have the clout of Linus Torvalds to get away with it), what he wrote absolutely needed to be said. I find it annoying that people dismiss it as personal attacks. If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks. It’s essential context for understanding what happened.
> If being a bad manager is the direct cause of a poor working relationship and bad engineering results, pointing it out is not a personal attacks.
The post did no such thing — it spread rumors and leaned into gossip. There’s no proof or evidence or examples whatsoever offered by Kelley except Jarred’s own public words, which means the post didn’t reveal or expose anything about his management.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market
Arguing that a product that sells itself as improving programmer productivity by writing the code for you has no stakes in "the programming language market" because it doesn't sell a programming language of its own is impressively shortsighted. Especially when the leader of a programming language has openly stated their dislike of vibecoding, critisized the industry, and the language project itself rejects PRs made with the product being sold.
Yeah I don't understand these myopic takes.
Jarred's post about Bun-Zig-Rust post was technical and polite.
Andrew's post in response was anything but that.
I'm starting to think that a way we can easily filter what's being heavily composed by (SOTA/mainstream) LLMs or not is by how "polite" the public sees their published blog post.
If everyone sees the post as "polite", most of it probably been written by LLMs, as they remove anything that could be seen as "nonpolite" and human. Meanwhile, engineers who just want to publish their own thoughts and feelings on a subject, will be filled with stuff the public sees as "nonpolite", and since those hard edges weren't trimmed before the publishing, we can then assume this is actually a genuine person's thoughts and feelings.
Polite but misleading in a way that makes zig look bad. So of course the response is sour.
> Anthropic is not in the programming language market;
No, they're intentionally in all the programming language markets.
Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.
Just like Google might sell ads on (approximately) all the websites, but they don't particularly care which website you visit.
> Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.
Other than JS (which they obviously do prefer), this rewrite would have taken place no matter what programming language was originally used for Bun.
The reason for the rewrite was marketing, not engineering. The justification after the fact can be done no matter what language they were rewriting from.
Zig -> Rust : "We had all these memory errors"
Rust -> Zig : "We had poor iteration due to compile times"
Java -> Anything : "Memory is at a premium when we're trying to run a fleet of agents"
Anything -> JS : "We wanted a single language to optimise our agents for"
You get the idea.
> Maybe. But they don't particularly care about one programming language over another.
I mean, they did buy a JS runtime, so surely they must care more about JavaScript and TypeScript than other languages, right? Otherwise that move makes 0 sense.
Maybe this part from their marketing post about the acquisition is just a straight up lie I suppose?
> Together, we’ll keep making Bun the best JavaScript runtime for all developers [...]
Yeah and Bun and Zig are not competing in anyway as well. Zig blog post has been updated as well recently btw.
> Zig's response is a sour opinion piece full of personal attacks.
Not sure; it has some elements of personal issues, but they're followed by a rationale from the author.
Honestly, seeing the project lead (Andrew Kelly) take a stand against poor engineering practices without any equivocation makes me more inclined to want to use Zig - their values (in this regard, at least) align with mine.
He also substantiates what many of us are saying to all these "Very Senior Chief Engineer with 40 years experience" who are boasting of 10x productivity: these people aren't reading the code they are generating, and were producing slop even without AI.
You mean Anthropic has no agenda on its own? That seems a very biased analysis here. The response by Zig could be flawed (speculation, I have not reached this conclusion yet) but I don't see how this offsets Anthropic wanting to promote its AI slop here in any way, shape or form.
Stating you use Codex does not add any meaningful information to the case.
I think the point of mentioning Codex was that the author of the post has no relationship with Anthropic, even as a user.
It reads as "I don't use Claude Code."
I'm using Arch Linux btw
Meant to imply he's not a Claude fanboi.
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.
This is not just a random blog post or technical decision, it’s literally a trillion dollar company’s marketing department deciding to attack and slander Zig.
Insane that people + tokens are slobbering to rush to Clownthropic’s defense when the whole migration and subsequent blog post was just sour grapes about the Zig project’s no slop policy.
And this is a warning shot from Anthropic intended to have a chilling effect, we have tens of billions of dollars at our disposal and if you take any stance we don’t like that undermines our narrative we will fuck with your shit and throw billions of dollars of muscle at rewriting you or trying to make you irrelevant.
It’s a huge stretch to call Bun’s post slander. It’s a relatively bland technical post with an extremely contextual negative opinion about Zig.
I read both posts, and didn’t leave the Bun one with a negative opinion of Zig. But I did leave the response post with that opinion.
Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't?
I knew it was gonna happen at one point, guess I didn't believe it'd happen so soon, but I still can't believe that nowadays people make choices about what programming language to used based on what semi-celebrity they like the most, and it's all about emotional arguments. What happened and since when is this the way people make technical choices? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe.
You are reaching quite a bit, and misrepresenting too.
But it's actually as simple as: Jarred's post was mature and didn't throw shade; Andrew's threw quite a bit of it while insisting it did not.
I and many others don't want to be slandered or trash-talked if we moved away from a language we previously chose. That can and has had actual business impact on projects / companies in the past. So naturally, people will judge you if you cannot be mature when responding to an event that made some splash in the ecosystem.
I didn’t say the other wasn’t technical.
(I also don’t have any opinions about micro-celebrities or whatever else. I don’t know Jarred or Andrew, and I have priors about JavaScript that in any other context would naturally bias me against Bun. But the Zig post’s flaws are, in my opinion, not ignorable.)
> I didn’t say the other wasn’t technical.
What was the technical parts of Zig's post that made you leave with a negative opinion of Zig then? Something doesn't add up here.
The technical content of the Andrew’s post didn’t leave me with a negative opinion. To quote my original comment:
> 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.
This is the negative opinion in question.
Yet one is technical and the one you actually got a negative opinion about a programming language supposedly isn't?
Yes, on the one hand here's "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" and on the other hand here's my blog "embedding-shape is a stinky slop beginner shit show"
And yet you got a negative opinion of me from the "embedding-shape is a stinky slop hack beginner shit show" post rather than SICP? I feel like I woke up in an alternative universe!
It's insane that you think there's any moral problem with using a LLM to rewrite a FOSS software project in another programming language, regardless of whether or not Anthropic employees are doing it. This is the kind of thing that every free software license worthy of the name allows and encourages anyone to do for any reason.
I didnt say that there was a moral or legal problem with rewriting FOSS in another language, I said that Anthropic doing so in this instance was a direct act of hostility aimed at chilling critical discourse about their products and marketing narrative, and I’m shocked at how many people (maybe) are rushing to their defense.
BTW the rhetorical device of misrepresenting what someone else says as something much weaker or incorrect and then arguing with that is usually called “strawmanning”. Just thought I’d point that out to you in case you weren’t conscious that this is what you’re doing.
Just for context, the person you're responding to works at a place that is a recipient of large donations from anthropic, so they might be less than objective.
https://discuss.python.org/t/anthropic-has-made-a-large-cont...
edit: My mistake, seems they work at OpenAI.
https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-08-14-project-status-marker...
I actually don’t work for the PSF, and have never received any money from the PSF. Thank you for imputing bias into my motives rather than responding to the comment, though.
True, which AI company do you work at?
Seems to be OpenAI?
https://blog.pypi.org/posts/2025-08-14-project-status-marker...
Slander? Are you serious?
> We wouldn't have gotten this far if not for Zig, and I'll always be grateful. Until very recently, programming language choice was a one-way decision for a project like Bun.
https://bun.com/blog/bun-in-rust
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.
Andrew essentially wrote that “bun code was bad anyway”.
And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate.
I think these points are fairly clear from his blog post
> And also he implied he doesn’t even want to engage with anything relating to this since Jarred is toxic and there is no value in the debate.
If he doesn't want to get involved, then why even write this piece?
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
Funding and owning something makes you accountable yes, that's how it works normally.
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.
Nobody and nothing is fluent is "web tech"!
web tech - HTML, CSS, JS, and based/derived frameworks
Yes, but your reply has now also recharacterized my original comment. I wasn't being pedantic.
I was saying that LLMs even worse at writing for the web than humans, and humans are pretty bad! I'm saying this as a web developer.
oh, it is subjective and depends on use cases, for most of my use cases in web dev , it did work really good
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?
> but do people blindly trust them
Judging from internet posts and HN comments, many do.
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.
I don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make.
Yes, “it could have been any other company”, but it wasn’t, it was this one. Had it been any other company, we’d be talking about that other company; because it was this one, we’re talking about this one.
My point is that the article starts with > Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering
But that's true only if one believe what they are putting out blindly. Why not just call it a bluff and move on rather than making a mountain out of molehill
I'm with Andrew.
It was just a marketing piece. It offered many data and pretty graphics but only that.
I think two things can be true at once....It was obviously a great marketing story for anthropic but that doesn't automatically mean that engineering work had no value. Companies have always turned interesting technical projects into marketing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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 ...
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.
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...
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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".
Ok mr alt account…
People have got to stop falling for exaggerated rage bait.
When I see bullet point lists, I hit the back button. Is this just me? The smell of AI- it's like rotting vegetables.
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
> The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything
If you read the post again this sentence is not removed and Sumner did not refute that
Right, that part is not in dispute.
If Sumner says today, "We do X," then Kelley can say, "Nine months ago, Sumner did not do X," and both can be correct. What Kelley can't do is say, "It's an outright fabrication that Sumner does X today," based on an observation from nine months ago.
> Anthropic is actively campaigning to end software engineering
I didn’t read further, this is just sensationalism at its crudest
What do you mean? It's literally been a significant part of their marketing.
Let’s assume their marketing argument is in good faith (it isn’t, they’re just capturing market knowing very well they won’t replace most software dev):
Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development. They make it more efficient, which could lead to less software developer.
How is this “campaigning to end software engineering”? It’s an exaggeration at best, dishonest and sensationalist at worst
>Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-ceo-says-softw...
https://xcancel.com/Vivek4real_/status/2074990159783768107
If you're selling a product and you're claiming that product will replace something, it's not unreasonable to claim that you want to end that thing.
>Where did Anthropic say that they want to “end” software development.
https://digitalstrategy-ai.com/2026/01/23/claude-code-anthro...
> 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.
"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.
I’m puzzled by how many people seem to be convinced (deluded?) into believing that their productivity has been multiplied and costs have become fractional to build things, why don’t I see any of that productivity gain or cost reduction out in the world? What has become cheaper or better engineered? If you believe posts like thsi, we should be living in a golden age of prosperity, when it seems that aside from getting better lots of products and companies seem to just be getting worse? Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?
A lot of those products are from big companies who seem to be struggling the most. Software does not solve bureaucracy. As an indie engineer, I have absolutely no doubt what I am doing myself.
But that change does not mean my products will become popular. That is a lot beyond software. Also, the tooling is just barely 1.5 years old and people are already asking for world-changing results. All the while totally ignoring what indies are saying.
I kind of disagree that asking for world changing results is setting the bar too high, people’s claims about their personal experience are that the world changing results are already here, productivity has been multiplied and costs have been reduced by some factor, and AFAICT everyone is using these tools, with many reporting a similar experience.
The fact that people’s personal experience using the tool don’t cohere with the impact the tool has had in the world to me doesn’t suggest a slippage between how long it takes for productivity multipliers to be felt, it suggests that these tools might actually be better at delivering the perception to the user (and where relevant, the user’s manager) of increased productivity while real productivity gains are lower, or maybe zero, or maybe negative in some cases.
The key word is "already". I myself absolutely expect world changing results. But that will need time. I can only say what I know. My own experiments in building nocodo, a coding agent are 12-13 years old. Pre-LLM. I used template based code generation and related ideas. Template processors and what not. nocodo.com is with me since 2013 maybe, you can verify.
I am a software engineer, most of my experiments are on GitHub. I would not have ventured into building the UI framework before LLMs.
And this is what bothers me - people are not looking at the generated software. Indies like us are experimenting like crazy. I live far outside the tech scene, in a small Himalayan village. But I resonate so much with the experiments, the methods, harness engineering and so many other topics. I see the benefits in how ambitious my projects are becoming.
I teach an online course on coding agents as a co-mentor. 600 young professionals join each month for a 2 week course. The joy of people, who did not know much technology, when they create a simple project management software by just typing English does not lie.
We used to write software in a very different manner. The entire mental paradigm has shifted. Many of my friends and acquaintances are on the fence, still! Some are internally giving up - unable to cope with this change. But the change is happening - the tooling is only going to get better.
Give it time. That is the opinion I hold.
> Like seriously, to a normal person, putting aside from the benefits of using LLM’s directly for the LLM user, what things in the world have gotten better thanks to this abundance and oversupply of “intelligence” that is supposedly mutiplying people’s productivity?
For the normal person, they now have more choice. To businesses it is an even more fierce competition. There is an illusion of productivity since everyone using LLMs can’t stop because their competitor is also moving faster with LLMs.
So everyone is so “productive” in “building” anything at the third of the cost, it also means that even the customers that the builders are selling to are also building their own solution themselves.
Customers turn into competitors faster and those in pure software are now making even less money. Except for companies in frontier AI, infrastructure and hardware.
You have a very fitting username
Nice write-up!
hey, does anyone remember when Slack wanted to replace email?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> The whole point of the borrow checker is to make it impossible to write wrong code.
> In 2026 we need guarantees that we can't produce invalid code.
Rust doesn't provide either of those guarantees.
If I were to rephrase your sentiment for accuracy: Rust disallows certain coding patterns. Certain classes of bugs can only appear in those coding patterns.
IOW, Rust disallows $FOO which is a superset of "specific class of errors". This means that while Rust prevents specific bugs, as a side-effect it will also prevent some correct code.
Very true. Rust prevents some good code as well.
Also it doesn't guarantee that the code is always 100% correct.
But I think this is the correct direction of programming language evolution.
Rust requires discipline too. I can go around using Arc, Rc and .clone() everywhere without upsetting the borrow checker, I can use let mut a bunch and pretend if, match, etc. aren't expressions. This results in worse code, and Rust didn't stop me.
The borrow checker prevents a set of errors from being possible, but it doesn't prevent bad code from being written.
It would be easier for you to argument that the user is expected to have discipline to NOT use "unsafe" keyword in all functions.
Because a lot of mechanisms actually still have guards in runtime. And using .clone() on Rc/Arc is actually the idiomatic/preferred way of evading the borrow checker if we can't design the data structure in a different way.
It's a big difference between cases when you need to spend brain energy to find ways to "out-smart" the compiler, and spend brain energy to "fit into the proper set of assumptions" of a programming language.
Most bugs are logic bugs which rust does nothing to help you with.
I disagree; Rust's type system, which supports pretty rich algebraic data types, makes it easier to specify the correct data model for your system than it would be in languages with simpler type systems like C or Python. The ability to define enum types with arbitrary shapes for each variant, and then match on them in code, allows programmers to build better, more-accurate abstractions and have less fear of screwing up and causing a logic bug.
In my experience, it absolutely does (at least if you use it idiomatically). Using the type system (esp. enums, Result and newtypes) makes a good bunch of invalid states irrepresentable.
This also helps to focus on the remaining things that could go wrong.
The integration of unit tests also lowers the barrier to just sprinkle some tests in, if you're unsure that you got an edge case right. Anf clippy (not stricly the language, but still kind of a core component) greaty helps to stay on the idiomatic track.
No silver bullet of course, but I never had so few runtime issues with any other programming language so far.
What logic bugs did you encounter the most?
edit: mobile typos
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.
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
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.
> 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!