What on earth is going on here?
9 days ago this is how the migration was described:
> I work on Bun and this is my branch
> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
> I’m curious to see what a working version of this looks, what it feels like, how it performs and if/how hard it’d be to get it to pass Bun’s test suite and be maintainable. I’d like to be able to compare a viable Rust version and a Zig version side by side.
9 days after that comment, the rewrite has been merged to master.
9 days after "this is my branch" "the code doesn't work" "I'm just curious" "high chance it's thrown out"... it's merged to master.
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Some people saw the original as an attempt to downplay the importance of the branch in response to negative feedback, rather than accurately describing what the branch represented.
Those people essentially predicted that Bun's actions would shortly reflect much more conviction than was being let on.
Experiments graduate to production all the time, but given the timelines involved, their predictions were correct.
Ironically these people are displaying great confidence in AI’s abilities.
If that’s the case, what are they objecting to exactly?
Maybe they were displaying high confidence in a marketing machine's ability to commit to dangerous stunts.
There is no way a human rewrite like this wouldn't be roughly at the same stage with a 9 day delta. In that case, some of these accusations would be reasonable to make. But that is not the case here.
People here are pointing the problem because Anthropic dude claimed, it is an experiment, tests are still failing, may go nowhere.. blah..blah.
If you had presented your point more thoughtfully, maybe I'd have spoon fed the point of my response, which 100% relates to what you said: your model of time compression is describing the speed of creating code.
But Bun is more than lines of code and serves as core infrastructure for lots of other projects. It's a terrible look in terms of governance to approach this migration as they have, especially the initial denial.
That shouldn't be contentious.
I'm being flippant because this should be incredibly easy to understand.
AI gives me 750k LoC PR that's mostly broken and unuseable on Monday.
AI then fixing it by adding another 250k LoC, is not going to convince me, a competent maintainer of a major Js runtime with years of contributions, plenty of downstream dependents, and an understanding of the AI zeitgeist... to merge it all in by the next Wednesday
Yes yes I'm sure Jarred is a really terrible engineer. Yawn.
>AI then fixing it by adding another 250k LoC, is not going to convince me, a competent maintainer of a major Js runtime with years of contributions, plenty of downstream dependents, and an understanding of the AI zeitgeist... to merge it all in by the next Wednesday
But you're not any of these things, are you? Regardless, of course you're free to not make the same decision. Doesn't really change the point.
And I didn't realize I was talking to a cheerleader the whole time: I guess I'll defer to you on if Jarred is consistently a terrible engineer, or is just being a terrible engineer this one time.
If you think there should be human review or that there should have been a lot more human collaboration, that's one thing but accusing Jarred of lying about his intentions is another thing entirely, and one where '9 days' is not remotely the proof people think it is in this situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019226
> This whole thread is an overreaction. 302 comments about code that does not work. We haven’t committed to rewriting. There’s a very high chance all this code gets thrown out completely.
With the nearly complete PR with the port to rust, a number of people predicted that it was going to happen. They were assured it's unlikely to happen and then they were accused of overreacting over effectively nothing. When those same people who were already upset about the rewrite, learned that their predictions the same ones that were rudely dismissed, were in fact, correct, they became upset again; this time about being lied to.
Correct or not, it's reasonable to conclude they were lied to. Especially given they correctly predicted the future.
No it's not. If we were 9 days away from a human written version of this experiment then yeah it would be reasonable to conclude they were lied to, because a human written version would progress so much slower and steadier that it's very unlikely you hadn't made up most of your mind a week before merge time.
But it's not human written. It's months, perhaps years of work compressed into a week, where the machine can go from 'nothing is working' to 'everything is working' in a few days. There is nothing reasonable about concluding you must have been lied to when such a delta in such a short time is possible. And if people fail to see that, then perhaps the initial assertions about an emotional meltdown were not so far off after all.
Irrational armchair quarterbacking driven by emotional reactions to change and perceived threats. It’s not worth worrying about this specific instance, but the overall trends could get messy. This is just a taste of that.