I had a broken, one-off Perl script, a relic from the days when everyone thought Drupal was the future (long time ago). It was originally designed to migrate a site from an unmaintained internal CMS to Drupal. The CMS was ancient and it only ran in a VM for "look what we built a million years ago" purposes (I even had written permission from my ex-employer to keep that thing).
Just for a laugh, I fed this mess of undeclared dependencies and missing logic into Claude and told it to port the whole thing to Rust. It spent 80 minutes researching Drupal and coding, then "one-shotted" a functional import tool. Not only did it mirror the original design and module structure, but it also implemented several custom plugins based on hints it found in my old code comments.
It burned through a mountain of tokens, but 10/10 - would generate tens of thousands of lines of useless code again.
The Epilogue: That site has since been ported to WordPress, then ProcessWire, then rebuilt as a Node.js app. Word on the street is that some poor souls are currently trying to port it to Next.js.
Me too! A couple days ago I gave claude the JMAP spec and asked it to write a JMAP based webmail client in rust from scratch. And it did! It burned a mountain of tokens, and its got more than a few bugs. But now I've got my very own email client, powered by the stalwart email server. The rust code compiles into a 2mb wasm bundle that does everything client side. Its somehow insanely fast. Honestly, its the fastest email client I've ever used by far. Everything feels instant.
I don't need my own email client, but I have one now. So unnecessary, and yet strangely fun.
Its quite a testament to JMAP that you can feed the RFC into claude and get a janky client out. I wonder what semi-useless junk I should get it to make next? I bet it wouldn't do as good a job with IMAP, but maybe if I let it use an IMAP library someone's already made? Might be worth a try!
Claude’s toy email client gets closer to the speed limit than Gmail does. Why is Gmail so slow? I have no idea.
RE: Claude Code, no I haven't used it, but I did do the Anthropic interview problem, beating all of Anthropic's reported Claude scores even with custom harnesses etc.
It's not a dunk that agents can't produce "as fast as can be" code; their code is usually still reasonably fast; it's just often 2-10x slower than can be.
Early on, these code agents wouldn't do basic good hygiene things, like check if the code compiled, avoid hallucinating weird modules, writing unit tests. And people would say they sucked ....
But if you just asked them to do those things: "After you write a file lint it and fix issues. After you finish this feature, write unit tests and fix all issues, etc ..."
Well, then they did that, it was great! Later the default prompts of these systems included enough verbiage to do that, you could get lazy again. Plus the models are are being optimized to know to do some of these things, and also avoid some bad code patterns from the start.
But the same applies to performance today. If you ask it to optimize for performance, to use a profiler, to analyze the algorithms and systemically try various optimization approaches ... it will do so, often to very good results.
Defect free. Immaculate types. Safe. Ergonomic. Beautiful to read.
AI is going to be writing a lot of Rust.
The final arguments of "rust is hard to write" are going to quiet down. This makes it even more accessible.
> Defect free.
I am an upstream developer on the Rust Project (lang, library, cargo, others), and obviously a big fan of Rust. This kind of advocacy doesn't help us, and in fact makes our jobs harder, because for some people this kind of advocacy is their main experience of people they assume are representative of Rust. Please take it down a notch.
I think Rust is the best available language for many kinds of problems. Not yet all, but we're always improving it to try to work for more people. It gets better over time. I'd certainly never call it, or almost any other software, "defect free".
And I'd never call it "the final language"; we're building it to last the test of time, and we hope things like the edition system mean that the successor to Rust is a future version of Rust, but things can always change, and we're not the only source of great ideas.
If you genuinely care about Rust, please adjust your advocacy of Rust to avoid hurting Rust and generating negative perceptions of Rust.
For a taste: I wish we didn’t need lifetime annotations, somehow. I wish rust had first class support for self borrows, possibly via explicit syntax indicating that a variable is borrowed, and thus pinned. Unpin breaks my brain, and I wish there were ways to do pin projections without getting a PhD first. I wish for async streams. I wish async executors were in std, and didn’t take so long to compile. I could go on and on.
I feel like there’s an even simpler & more beautiful language hiding inside rust. I can’t quite see it. But I really hope someone else can bring it into the world some day.
Oh my, there's a new language called Rust? Didn't they know there already is one? The old one is so popular that I can't imagine the nicely readable one to gain any traction whatsoever (even if the old one is an assault on the senses).
I honestly can't tell if this is a humorous attack or not.
Poe's law is validated once again.
It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things, but if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust.
If you get any language outputs "for free", Rust is the way to go.
I've been using Claude to go ridiculously fast in Rust recently. In the pre-LLM years I wrote a lot of Rust, but it definitely was a slow to author language. Claude helps me produce it as fast as I can think. I spend most of my time reviewing the code and making small fixes and refactors. It's great.
I used to think that I would never write C code again, but when I decided recently to build something that would run on ESP32 chips, I realized there wasn't any good reason for me to use Rust yet. ESP-IDF is built on C and I can write C code just fine. C compiles quickly, it's a very simple language on the surface, and as long as you minimize the use of dynamic memory allocation and other pitfalls, it's reliable.
My biggest problem with rust right now is enormous target/ dirs.
We're working on that and it should get better soonish. We're working on shared caches, as well as pruning of old cached builds of dependencies that are unlikely to be reused in a future build.
Claude is an Anthropic offering.
It's not, nor is it well informed. People are currently developing languages specifically for use by LLMs.
> It's not the best tool for the job for a lot of things
Then how could it possibly be the final language?
> if the LLMs make writing it as fast as anything else - whelp, I can't see any reason not to do it in Rust
This has nothing to do with the claim that it's the final language.
As AI makes human-readable syntax less relevant, the Erlang/Elixir BEAM virtual machine is an ideal compilation target because its "let it crash" isolated process model provides system-level fault tolerance against AI logic errors, arguably more valuable than Rust’s strict memory safety.
The native Actor Model simplifies massive concurrency by eliminating shared state and the complex thread management. BEAM's hot code swapping capability also enables a continuous deployment where an AI can dynamically rewrite and inject optimized functions directly into live applications with zero downtime.
Imagine a future where an LLM is constantly monitoring server performance, profiling execution times, and dynamically rewriting sub-optimal functions in real-time. With Rust, every optimization requires a recompile and a deployment cycle that interrupts the system.
Finally, Erlang's functional immutability makes deterministic AI reasoning easier, while its built-in clustering replaces complex external infrastructure, making it a resilient platform suited for automated iteration.
And fyi, jmap is just a protocol for doing email over json & http. It’s not that hard to roll your own. Especially in a web browser.
Would be interesting to see it, did you publish it yet?
Only the client parts. And only the client parts its actually using. JMAP clients can be much simpler than servers. A JMAP server needs the whole protocol. JMAP clients only need to implement the parts they use. And servers need code to parse message envelopes - which is way more difficult to do correctly than people think. JMAP clients can just use pre-parsed messages from the server.
Anyway, the code is here if you wanna take a look:
https://github.com/josephg/claude-mail
Claude put its JMAP API wrapper code in a child crate (confusingly also called jmap-client).
The JMAP client itself is hosted here: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/
I can't prove this but its a purely static web app. You need a jmap server to use it. If you use stalwart, set:
server.listener.http.permissive-cors = true
server.listener.https.permissive-cors = true
Live version: https://seph.au/claude-webmail/
This is the biggest bottleneck at this point. I'm looking forward to RAM production increasing, and getting to a point where every high-end PC (workstation & gaming) has a dedicated NPU next to the GPU. You'll be able to do this kind of stuff as much as you want, using any local model you want. Run a ralph loop continuously for 72 hours? No problem.
But let's be honest to ourselves, the sort of useless code the GP meant will never ever be used for any of that. The code will never leave their personal storage. In that sense it's about as valuable for the society at large as the combined exabytes of GenAI smut that people have been filling their drives with by running their 4090s 24/7.
No that’s a stretch, but firing up a AAA game.
How long time do we have to wait before these people get bored? Or might they actually find what they generate useful and it doesn't all go straight to /dev/null, since seemingly it seems to gain usage, not drop in usage?
Drupal is the future. I never really used it properly, but if you fully buy into Drupal, it can do most everything without programming, and you can write plugins (extensions? whatever they're called...) to do the few things that do need programming.
> The Epilogue: That site has since been ported to WordPress, then ProcessWire, then rebuilt as a Node.js app. Word on the street is that some poor souls are currently trying to port it to Next.js.
This is the problem! Fickle halfwits mindlessly buying into whatever "next big thing" is currently fashionable. They shoulda just learned Drupal...
Wordpress loves to shove php objects into the database (been a good long while since I used it, don't remember the mechanism, it'd be the equivalent of `pickle` in python, only readable by php).
Not sure if they've improved it since I last dealt with it about 15 years ago, but at the time there was no way to have a full separated staging and production environment, lots of the data stored in the database that way had hardcoded domain names built into it. We needed to have a staging and production kind of set-up, so we ended up having to write a PHP script that would dump the staging database, fix every reference, and push it to production. Fun times.
No idea what's used in wordpress, but back in D6 and before, it was common to see it when it would store multiple values for an instance.
Pardon me, and, yes, I know we're on HN, but I guess you're... rich? I imagine a single run like this probably burns through tens or hundreds of dollars. For a joke, basically.
I guess I understand why some people really like AI :-)
All of them are moving into the direction of "less human involved and agents do more", while what I really want is better tooling for me to work closer with AI and be better at reviewing/steering it, and be more involved. I don't want "Fire one prompt and get somewhat working code", I want a UX tailored for long sessions with back and forth, letting me leverage my skills, rather than agents trying to emulate what I already can do myself.
It was said a long time ago about computing in general, but more fitting than ever, "Augmenting the human intellect" is what we should aim for, not replacing the human intellect. IA ("Intelligence amplification") rather than AI.
But I'm guessing the target market for such tools would be much smaller, basically would require you to already understand software development, and know what you want, while all AI companies seem to target non-developers wanting to build software now. It's no-code all over again essentially.
Same thing.
(or generally: “Is the cocaine cartel comparison fair or unfair?”)
And in my experience potheads offer you a toke and if you politely refuse, no problem at all. Coke addicts don't want to take no for an answer and insist that everybody should do it, they get so much more done, decisions are faster and better and what the hell is wrong with you if you don't want some?
So, the users are similar too.
Is that what you mean by IA?
For example, I type "for" and my editor guesses I want to iterate over the list that is the second argument of the function for which I am currently building the body. So it offers to complete the rest of the loop condition for me. Not only did it anticipate that I am writing a for loop. It figures out what I want to iterate over, and perhaps even that I want to enumerate the iteration so I have the index and the value. Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body. How much better could it augment my intellect?
I'm guessing the direction I'd prefer, would be tooling built to accept and be driven by humans, but allowed to be extended/corrected by AI, or something like that, maybe.
Maybe a slight contradiction, and very wish-washy/hand-wavey, but I haven't personally quite figured out what I think would be best yet either, what the right level actually is, so probably the best I could say right now :) Sorry!
>Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.
This in particular is not dissimilar from opening a chat with a model and giving it a prompt as usual but then adding at the end:
Begin your response below:
{ func> Imagine if I had written a comment to explain my intent for the function before I started writing the function body.
The loon programming language (a Lisp) has "semantic functions", where the body is just the doc comment.
I want less ambitious LLM powered tools than what's being offered. For example, I'd love a tool that can analyse whether comments have been kept up to date with the code they refer to. I don't want it to change anything I just want it to tell me of any problems. A linter basically. I imagine LLMs would be a good foundation for this.
One problem I've noticed is that both claude models and gpt-codex variants make absolutely deranged tool calls (like `cat <<'EOF' >> foo...EOF` pattern to create a file, or sed to read a couple lines), so it's sometimes hard to see what is it even trying to do.
I'm sure it can. I'd still like a single use tool though.
But that's just my taste. I'm very simple. I don't even use an IDE.
edit: to expand on what I mean. I would love it if there was a tool that has conquered the problem and doesn't require me to chat with it. I'm all for LLMs helping and facilitating the coding process, but I'm so far disappointed in the experience. I want something more like the traditional process but using LLMs to solve problems that would be otherwise difficult to solve computationally.
This is because, regardless of the current state of things, the endgame which will justify all the upfront investment is autonomous, self-improving, self-maintaining systems.
"Bicycle for the mind", as always when it involves Jobs, sounds more fitting for the masses though, so thanks for sharing that :)
Though if apocalypse happens and all of our built tech goes away, we are in for a serious survival issu.
given that we've also lost the faculty to look at the past with anything other than contempt most people wouldn't even know what they miss. The little problem with losing the 'general cognition' department, just like broad social or cultural decline is that you lose the ability to even judge what you're losing, because the thing you just lost was doing the judging
(1) It captures the ideal so well
(2) The bitter irony of how thoroughly pre-OS X Macintosh computers failed to live up to it
I feel like there's a similar dichotomy in LLM tools now
their valuations are replaced on getting rid of you entirely, along with everyone else
the "humans can use it to increase their productivity" is an interim step
I decided to create a Claude skill called "teach". When I enable it, Claude never writes any code. It just gives me hints - progressively more detailed if I am stuck. Then it reviews what I write.
I am finding it very satisfying to work this way - Rust in particular is a language where there's little space to "wing it". Most language features are interlaced with each other and having an LLM supporting me helps a lot. "Let's not declare a type for this right now, we would have to deal with several lifetime issues, let's add a note to the plan and revisit this later".
This link also has a comparison to Skills further down.
https://code.claude.com/docs/en/output-styles#built-in-outpu...
I used Claude to rewrite it in golang and extend its features. Now I have tests, automatic AIA chain walking, support for all the DER and JKS formats, and it’s fast. My bash script could spend a few minutes churning through a folder with certs and keys, my golang version does a few thousand in a second.
So I basically built a limited version of OpenSSL with better ergonomics and a lot of magic under the hood because you don’t have to specify input formats at all. I wasn’t constrained by things like backwards compatibility and interface stability, which let me make something much nicer to use.
I even was able to build a wasm version so it can run in the browser. All this from someone that is not a great coder. Don’t worry, I’m explicitly not rolling my own crypto.
The industry hasn't come up with a simple meme-format term to explain this workflow pattern yet, so people aren't excited about it. But don't worry, we'll surely have a bullshit term for it soon, and managers everywhere will be excited. In the meantime, we can just continue doing work with these new tools.
Don’t do that! On a two-day-old term?!
No wonder we’re called gatekeepers.
It's vibe engineering
Operative word being “some”. The issue is that too many aren’t doing it that way.
> You dont just go “build thing”
Tell that to the overwhelming majority of posters discussing vibe coding, including on HN.
As long as they get paid for it (or have fun, if it's a personal project), they couldn't care less about that. Tomorrow's problems are overrated.
The difference now is they can get much further along.
Thinking people who disagree with you hate you or hate the thing you like is a recipe for disaster. It's much better to not love or hate things like this, and instead just observe and come to useful, outcome-based conclusions.
There's a huge distinction between Vibe Coding, and actual software engineers using AI tooling effectively. I vibe code for fun sometimes too, nothing wrong with it, helps me figure out how the model behaves in some instances, and to push the limits of what I understand.
There's other things too though: my ADD and my impostor syndrome don't matter to Claude, Claude just takes it all in, so as I keep brain dumping, it keeps chugging along. I don't have to worry a bout "can I really do this?" it just does it and I can focus on "what can I do to make it better" essentially.
For me it's beyond "porn coding" its basically fulfilling my vision that's been locked away for years but I've had no time to sit down and do it fully. I can tell Claude to do something, my kid comes up and asks me to go draw with them and I can actually just walk away and look at the output and refine.
I absolutely hate how "slop" has lost its meaning.
"AI slop" was supposed to mean poor-quality content that's obviously AI-generated. But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted it to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality. EDIT: Or even the quantity of AI. Expedition 33 had a ton of critical acclaim and ended up winning tons of awards, yet once it was discovered that AI was used to generate some placeholder art, of which NONE of it was actually used in the final product, some people started labeling the game as AI slop. It's utterly ridiculous.
So now, we can't have conversations about AI slop without starting off with making sure everyone is on the same page on what the term even means.
EDIT: "Vibe coding" is suffering a similar fate. If I use AI to write some code, and I examine the code to make sure it doesn't have any obvious bugs or security issues, is that still vibe coding?
> We’ve verified that every AST produced by the Rust parser is identical to the C++ one, and all bytecode generated by the Rust compiler is identical to the C++ compiler’s output.
Is this a conventional goal? It seems like quite an achievement.
Porting a project from PHP7 to PHP8, you'd want the exact same SQL statements to be sent to the server for your test suite, or at least be able to explain the differences. Porting AngularJS to Vue, you'd want the same backend requests, etc..
I’ve been throwing codex at them and now they’ve all been rewritten in Go - cut down to about 10mb per process.
In my coding agent std::slop I've optimized for this workflow https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/docs/mail_mode... basically the idea is that you are the 'maintainer' and you get bisect safe, git patches that you review (or ask a code reviewer skill or another agent to review). Any change re-rolls the whole stack. Git already supports such a flow and I added it to the agent. A simple markdown skill does not work because it 'forgets'. A 'github' based PR flow felt too externally dependent. This workflow is enforced by a 'patcher' skill, and once that's active, tools do not work unless they follow the enforced flow.
I think a lot of people are going to feel comfortable using agents this way rather than going full blast. I do all my development this way.
Would be curious to see more about how you save tokens with lua too.
Do you blog?
- A bit more on mail mode https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2020022329154420830
- on the Lua integration https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2022911468262350976 (I've since disabled the recursion, not every code file is long and it seems simpler to not do it), but the rest of it is still there
- hotwords for skill activation https://x.com/hsaliak/status/2024322170353037788
Also /review and /feedback. /feedback (the non code version) opens up the LLM's last response in an editor so you can give line by line comments. Inspired by "not top posting" from mailing lists.
All my vibe coded projects are human directed, unless explicitly stated otherwise
No, they are quite terrible at doing that.
They may (I guess?) produce code that compiles, but they will, almost certainly not produce the appropriate combination of idioms and custom abstractions that may the code "at home" in the target language.
PS - Please fix your blockquote... HN ignores single linebreaks, so you have to either using pairs of them, or possibly go with italicization of the quoted text.
And you might say that this is a hypothetical problem, one that is not practically occurring. Well, we had a similar problem like this in the recent past, that LLMs are close to _making actual_. When it comes to software patents, they were considered a _hypothetical_ problem (i.e. nobody is going to bother suing you unless you were so big that violating a patent was a near certainty). We were instructed (at pretty much all jobs), to never read patents, so that we cannot incriminate ourselves in the discovery process.
That is going to change soon (within a year). I have friend, whom I won't name, who is working on a project, using LLMs, to discover whether software (open source and proprietary) is likely to be violating a software patent from a patent database. And it is designed to be used, not by programmers, but by law firms, patent attorneys, etc. Even though it is not marketed this way, it is essentially a target acquisition system for use by patent trolls. It is hard for me to tell if this means that we will have to keep ignoring patents for that plausible deniability, or if this means that we will have to become hyper informed about all patents. I suppose, we can just subscribe to the patent-agent, and hope that it guides the other coding agents into avoiding the insertion of potentially infringing code.
(I also have a friend who built a system in 2020 that could translate between C++ and Python, and guarantee equivalent results, and code that looks human-written. This was a very impressive achievement, especially because of how it guarantees the equivalence (it did not require machine-learning nor GPUs, just CPUs and some classic algorithms from the 80s). The friend informs me that they are very disheartened to see that now any toddler with a credit card can mindlessly do something similar, invalidating around a decade of unpublished research. They tell me that it will remain unpublished, and if they could go back in time, they would spend that decade extracting as much surplus from society as possible, by hook or by crook (apparently they had the means and the opportunity, but lacked the motive); we should all learn from my friend's mistake. The only people who succeed are, sadly, perversely, those who brazenly and shamelessly steal -- and make no mistake, the AI companies are built on theft. When millionaires do it, they become billionaires -- when Aaron Swartz does it, he is sentenced to federal prison. I'm not quite a pessimist yet, but it really is saddening to watch my friend go from a passionate optimist to a cold nihilist.).
If there was value (the guarantees) to this tech he buried a bunch of time in, he should be wrapping a natural language prompt around it and selling it.
Not even the top providers are giving any sort of tangible safety or reliability guarantees in the enterprise…