5 ms·

IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. Although, I wish the porting docs were a little wordsmith

by Eufrat 2mo ago

IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. Although, I wish the porting docs were a little wordsmithed by a human, the AI generated text style is grating. The stakes are low, it’s mostly for fun and you can iterate on it. Compare this with Bun which was just like, “hey we converted everything to Bun to Rust from Zig, of course it works, what could possibly go wrong, I’ll totally write up a blogpost (that still doesn’t exist) explaining what we did, you can put this into your production environment soon!”

johnfn 2mo ago
I don't really get the Bun thing. Bun is running Claude Code which is probably the single most actively used development app there is. You say this was a bad use of LLMs, but it's been in production for a while and I haven't heard of any evidence that Claude Code has increased a significantly larger quantity of errors, segfaults, etc, than before.
- MuffinFlavored 2mo ago
  > Yes, Claude Code uses Bun. In fact, Claude Code relies on it as a core dependency and ships as a self-contained Bun executable. I... somehow did not know that.
  - stymaar 2mo ago
    You missed the day when they had their bun build misconfigured which ended up leaking the entirety of Claude Code's codebase? (I wish I was joking)
    - johnfn 2mo ago
      Pretty sure the author of Bun stated this was not related to Bun here on HN.
      - stymaar 2mo ago
        It was due to Anthropic's misconfiguration of Bun so you can argue it's not Bun's fault. IIRC it's the default config though, so maybe it's a little bit of Bun's fault but I didn't check that.
    - baq 2mo ago
      The best part is how little it mattered. Everyone just shrugged.
- gpm 2mo ago
  > it's been in production for a while Huh... it looks to me like bun has yet to cut a release post Zig->Rust port (the latest one on github is still on a branch that says it's written in zig in the readme). I assume that nothing is using the rust version yet... Which also cuts against the complaints about "of course it works [...] you can put this into your production environment soon!" since they don't seem to be asserting either of those things.
  - Eufrat 2mo ago
    The real problem is they explained nothing and just caused a lot of mistrust. The lead developer at Bun working on this project does post here from time to time and I have never seen him answer any of this. I admire his enthusiasm, but this was badly handled mostly from Bun’s side which lead to a bunch of dogpiling. When someone on another social media platform commented expressed some concern, his response was to ask him what the explicit bug he was talking about was and that he would generate a fix. That sound you hear is the woosh as the point flies by. And in general, this just feels like a consistent problem with Bun.
    - johnfn 2mo ago
      When you hear a woosh as the point flies by, I see someone attacking a project for using AI rather than any concrete technical reason. Jared's question is to disentangle an actual Rust-related bug report from someone who likes to complain about AI.
- qsort 2mo ago
  I agree that the Bun rewrite is much more reasonable than knee-jerk reactions imply, however: - I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build - Claude Code is not a particularly complicated piece of software from an engineering perspective (nor it's particularly well-engineered, at least at the moment). So in my book "it runs Claude Code" would be pretty weak evidence that the rewrite is going to be successful (the tests they've done are much better evidence, but that's a topic for another time).
  - Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
    > - I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build No, I'm pretty sure it is, actually, since June 17: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181 https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181 >> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4 Now, Bun 1.4 doesn't seem to officially exist on https://bun.com/blog https://bun.com/blog or https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases, so I can't be 100% sure this is the Rust version. However, I have to do some patching of the Claude Code binary to get it to run on my OS, and version 2.1.181 coincided with some changes that make suspect it's using Rust now.
    - andai 2mo ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609168 https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewrite-from-zig-to-rust/ https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewri... > 13,044 unsafe blocks in the resulting Rust code (hand-written Rust projects of similar size average ~73) Grok is this true? I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny. Hang on. A claim like that can be verified with a single grep! Give me a minute... $ rg -U "unsafe\s+\{" . | wc -l 10551 Hey, that's progress!
      - gpm 2mo ago
        > I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny. If I understand what happened here correctly this isn't really a case of any such meme, but the result of the porters (heh) telling the LLM to directly convert zig code using unsafe to match the previous code "exactly". I.e. more like using the LLM as a fancy version of c2rust [1] (which would result in just as much unsafe) than a result of LLMs reaching for escape hatches too liberally. [1] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust https://github.com/immunant/c2rust
- Eufrat 2mo ago
  Some people, myself included, think that announcing a conversion from Rust to Zig as an experiment then jumping to putting it in the alpha train for public testing/consumption without any real explanation in the span of around 2 weeks is irresponsible and reckless. Blogposts were promised, details were hinted, but no, it’s just full steam ahead because the AI worked so well. The converted unit tests all worked, all the synthetic tests are okay, so what are you complaining about? At some point, it’s less about the technical questions and more about getting that pesky human buy-in.
  - johncolanduoni 2mo ago
    What does Bun’s governance look like? Now that Anthropic bought the company are there significant external contributors that would expected to have input on a decision like this?
    - peteyycz 2mo ago
      And why buy it when they could have just called it Run and do the Rust conversion anyways? The license prohibits it, they don’t need the team’s expertise anymore, since they’re running full AI vibecode mode. Makes no sense to me
      - gpm 2mo ago
        Seems pretty clear that they do need the team, to direct the LLM effectively. Also they're probably interested in the team just as an acqui-hire of good developers, and they're probably interested in the marketing value of converting the actual bun to rust via LLMs. But mostly I'd assume it was about needing the team to effectively direct the LLMs.
  - sharts 2mo ago
    IMO it’s reckless to not pin down ones dependencies. No need to pull the latest experimental hotness
    - Eufrat 2mo ago
- burnte 2mo ago
  I have yet to hear any evidence that the Rust rewrite was harmful. I have no emotional investment in Bun (which I'd never heard of before the rewrite), or Zig (which I also didn't know about), or Rust (which I think is neat and that's about it), so I'm about as unbiased as you can get and from what I saw the conversion was done well, and I haven't heard of massive bugs resulting from the rewrite.
  - GuB-42 2mo ago
    It is probably fine, it is kind of a best case scenario: porting a good code base with lots of unit tests, all hand-written. Not much can go wrong here as the LLM is kept in check by the original code, the tests, and the fact that the topic (a JS engine) is well documented. The problem is what comes next. They now have code that they don't understand, and they are likely to work on it with AI in the future, but the new features they may introduce later will not have the luxury of hand-written tests and a reference code. So, unless they undertake the massive effort needed to fully understand the Rust code and deal with all these "unsafe", quality is very likely to go down, Microslop style.
    - baq 2mo ago
      It’s always been a fallacy to think that large organizations have code which is understood. There are people somewhere understanding small parts up until the next round of layoffs.
      - esailija 2mo ago
        Millions were invested in this project where they fired the expensive experts (me included) and replaced with a small army of cheap devs (which was actually more expensive and less productive than just retaining even one of the experts would have been). Couple years later the inevitable happened and the whole thing was thrown into trash. Code without anyone who understands it is just a liability.
- andai 2mo ago
  Wait is the new CC running on the vibe coded Bun?
- nozzlegear 2mo ago
  > which is probably the single most actively used development app there is Seems doubtful, I'd put money on it being something like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. Maybe CC could claim the (odious) title of most actively used vibe-coded development app, though.
aussieguy1234 2mo ago
The model did the work, probably has it all in its context window, so it may actually be better placed here to write the docs.
general_reveal 2mo ago
IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. This is quite the understatement. Actually, it's probably the understatement of the year. "Pretty good, not bad, great use case". Dude. Fable fucking did what?
- NamlchakKhandro 2mo ago
  It hallucinated that people play games on Apple products.
  - latexr 2mo ago
    I recommend you do even some basic cursory search on the size of the iOS gaming market VS consoles and desktops. You’ll find out your snark is embarrassingly misplaced. Look at the dates of the articles you find, too. Some will be almost fifteen years old.
- didibus 2mo ago
  It added iOS support, the upstream repo had already ported the game to Linux and MacOS.
pathartl 2mo ago
I have a port of BuildGDX in the project backlog that was basically just throwing Claude at it to go from Java to .NET. The only thing it really got hung up on was Java's byte being signed. What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.

by Eufrat 2mo ago

johnfn 2mo ago

I don't really get the Bun thing. Bun is running Claude Code which is probably the single most actively used development app there is. You say this was a bad use of LLMs, but it's been in production for a while and I haven't heard of any evidence that Claude Code has increased a significantly larger quantity of errors, segfaults, etc, than before.

MuffinFlavored 2mo ago
> Yes, Claude Code uses Bun. In fact, Claude Code relies on it as a core dependency and ships as a self-contained Bun executable. I... somehow did not know that.
- stymaar 2mo ago
  You missed the day when they had their bun build misconfigured which ended up leaking the entirety of Claude Code's codebase? (I wish I was joking)
  - johnfn 2mo ago
    Pretty sure the author of Bun stated this was not related to Bun here on HN.
    - stymaar 2mo ago
      It was due to Anthropic's misconfiguration of Bun so you can argue it's not Bun's fault. IIRC it's the default config though, so maybe it's a little bit of Bun's fault but I didn't check that.
  - baq 2mo ago
    The best part is how little it mattered. Everyone just shrugged.
gpm 2mo ago
> it's been in production for a while Huh... it looks to me like bun has yet to cut a release post Zig->Rust port (the latest one on github is still on a branch that says it's written in zig in the readme). I assume that nothing is using the rust version yet... Which also cuts against the complaints about "of course it works [...] you can put this into your production environment soon!" since they don't seem to be asserting either of those things.
- Eufrat 2mo ago
  The real problem is they explained nothing and just caused a lot of mistrust. The lead developer at Bun working on this project does post here from time to time and I have never seen him answer any of this. I admire his enthusiasm, but this was badly handled mostly from Bun’s side which lead to a bunch of dogpiling. When someone on another social media platform commented expressed some concern, his response was to ask him what the explicit bug he was talking about was and that he would generate a fix. That sound you hear is the woosh as the point flies by. And in general, this just feels like a consistent problem with Bun.
  - johnfn 2mo ago
    When you hear a woosh as the point flies by, I see someone attacking a project for using AI rather than any concrete technical reason. Jared's question is to disentangle an actual Rust-related bug report from someone who likes to complain about AI.
qsort 2mo ago
I agree that the Bun rewrite is much more reasonable than knee-jerk reactions imply, however: - I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build - Claude Code is not a particularly complicated piece of software from an engineering perspective (nor it's particularly well-engineered, at least at the moment). So in my book "it runs Claude Code" would be pretty weak evidence that the rewrite is going to be successful (the tests they've done are much better evidence, but that's a topic for another time).
- Wowfunhappy 2mo ago
  > - I don't think Claude Code is using the Rust version yet in their official build No, I'm pretty sure it is, actually, since June 17: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181 https://code.claude.com/docs/en/changelog#2-1-181 >> Upgraded the bundled Bun runtime to 1.4 Now, Bun 1.4 doesn't seem to officially exist on https://bun.com/blog https://bun.com/blog or https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/releases, so I can't be 100% sure this is the Rust version. However, I have to do some patching of the Claude Code binary to get it to run on my OS, and version 2.1.181 coincided with some changes that make suspect it's using Rust now.
  - andai 2mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609168 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609168 https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewrite-from-zig-to-rust/ https://grigio.org/bun-1-4-the-controversial-ai-driven-rewri... > 13,044 unsafe blocks in the resulting Rust code (hand-written Rust projects of similar size average ~73) Grok is this true? I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny. Hang on. A claim like that can be verified with a single grep! Give me a minute... $ rg -U "unsafe\s+\{" . | wc -l 10551 Hey, that's progress!
    - gpm 2mo ago
      > I've heard the meme that AI written rust code is absurdly full and safe blocks but... that's pretty funny. If I understand what happened here correctly this isn't really a case of any such meme, but the result of the porters (heh) telling the LLM to directly convert zig code using unsafe to match the previous code "exactly". I.e. more like using the LLM as a fancy version of c2rust [1] (which would result in just as much unsafe) than a result of LLMs reaching for escape hatches too liberally. [1] https://github.com/immunant/c2rust https://github.com/immunant/c2rust
Eufrat 2mo ago
Some people, myself included, think that announcing a conversion from Rust to Zig as an experiment then jumping to putting it in the alpha train for public testing/consumption without any real explanation in the span of around 2 weeks is irresponsible and reckless. Blogposts were promised, details were hinted, but no, it’s just full steam ahead because the AI worked so well. The converted unit tests all worked, all the synthetic tests are okay, so what are you complaining about? At some point, it’s less about the technical questions and more about getting that pesky human buy-in.
- johncolanduoni 2mo ago
  What does Bun’s governance look like? Now that Anthropic bought the company are there significant external contributors that would expected to have input on a decision like this?
  - peteyycz 2mo ago
    And why buy it when they could have just called it Run and do the Rust conversion anyways? The license prohibits it, they don’t need the team’s expertise anymore, since they’re running full AI vibecode mode. Makes no sense to me
    - gpm 2mo ago
      Seems pretty clear that they do need the team, to direct the LLM effectively. Also they're probably interested in the team just as an acqui-hire of good developers, and they're probably interested in the marketing value of converting the actual bun to rust via LLMs. But mostly I'd assume it was about needing the team to effectively direct the LLMs.
- sharts 2mo ago
  IMO it’s reckless to not pin down ones dependencies. No need to pull the latest experimental hotness
  - Eufrat 2mo ago
burnte 2mo ago
I have yet to hear any evidence that the Rust rewrite was harmful. I have no emotional investment in Bun (which I'd never heard of before the rewrite), or Zig (which I also didn't know about), or Rust (which I think is neat and that's about it), so I'm about as unbiased as you can get and from what I saw the conversion was done well, and I haven't heard of massive bugs resulting from the rewrite.
- GuB-42 2mo ago
  It is probably fine, it is kind of a best case scenario: porting a good code base with lots of unit tests, all hand-written. Not much can go wrong here as the LLM is kept in check by the original code, the tests, and the fact that the topic (a JS engine) is well documented. The problem is what comes next. They now have code that they don't understand, and they are likely to work on it with AI in the future, but the new features they may introduce later will not have the luxury of hand-written tests and a reference code. So, unless they undertake the massive effort needed to fully understand the Rust code and deal with all these "unsafe", quality is very likely to go down, Microslop style.
  - baq 2mo ago
    It’s always been a fallacy to think that large organizations have code which is understood. There are people somewhere understanding small parts up until the next round of layoffs.
    - esailija 2mo ago
      Millions were invested in this project where they fired the expensive experts (me included) and replaced with a small army of cheap devs (which was actually more expensive and less productive than just retaining even one of the experts would have been). Couple years later the inevitable happened and the whole thing was thrown into trash. Code without anyone who understands it is just a liability.
andai 2mo ago
Wait is the new CC running on the vibe coded Bun?
nozzlegear 2mo ago
> which is probably the single most actively used development app there is Seems doubtful, I'd put money on it being something like Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. Maybe CC could claim the (odious) title of most actively used vibe-coded development app, though.

aussieguy1234 2mo ago

The model did the work, probably has it all in its context window, so it may actually be better placed here to write the docs.

general_reveal 2mo ago

IMHO, this is an actual good use of what sounds like a person guiding a model to do a mass conversion. This is quite the understatement. Actually, it's probably the understatement of the year. "Pretty good, not bad, great use case". Dude. Fable fucking did what?

NamlchakKhandro 2mo ago
It hallucinated that people play games on Apple products.
- latexr 2mo ago
  I recommend you do even some basic cursory search on the size of the iOS gaming market VS consoles and desktops. You’ll find out your snark is embarrassingly misplaced. Look at the dates of the articles you find, too. Some will be almost fifteen years old.
didibus 2mo ago
It added iOS support, the upstream repo had already ported the game to Linux and MacOS.

pathartl 2mo ago

I have a port of BuildGDX in the project backlog that was basically just throwing Claude at it to go from Java to .NET. The only thing it really got hung up on was Java's byte being signed. What I ended up with was a port of Duke 3D that uses half the allocated RAM as DukeGDX.