"No one has the intention of building a wall" - Walter Ulbricht, chairman of the central committee, a couple of months before the Berlin Wall was built.
The AI companies and their associates are beginning to surpass that level of denials and lies.
Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change. Also their feelings are not hurt by what you or I think, they don’t care.
> Powerful people figured out how to make suspicion work for them long ago. You have every right to be unconditionally suspicious, but it’s not a good way of accomplishing any change.
How does one accomplish change? Even being a martyr doesn't get traction. As far as I can tell, you need to already be powerful. Nobody lets you into that group if you're not aligned with said group.
Protests (at least in their current form) don't work. Trying to assassinate someone doesn't move the needle (also not the play, I don't support murder), vocal grassroots leaders are no longer relevant at all, if they ever were.
Not by trading the same suspicions on the internet with fellow true believers over and over again, I think the past 10 years have proven that pretty conclusively. Maybe people should try some of the things previous social movements did, seemed to work pretty well even against a much more uniform media environment and a stronger hostile social consensus.
Protests don’t immediately solve everything, but I think looking at 2026 and concluding they don’t move the needle at all is a weird take. There are recent examples of protest movements (especially long-term ones) working all over the world.
I said assassinations don’t move the needle. Protests just give people the warm fuzzies. They don’t change anything. Tell me what has changed with all of the no kings protests? How well did it go for Iran when they protested?
The onus is on you to prove your point, not me to disprove it.
Dario Amodei is not Elon Musk. Most powerful people do not internalize the emotions of others (though obviously some do). If you think powerful people are disproportionately sociopaths, you either agree with me or are not using the word correctly.
They generally care about what powerful/influential people think. I’m not powerful or influential, but I guess maybe the person I was talking to is. If so I apologize for the miscommunication.
Four days ago there was no intention to rewrite, now it's a simple desire to refactor. It's not adversarial conclusion, it's pointing out the clear hypocrisy.
Running an experiment, the experiment being more successful than you thought, and then deciding to put more effort into a bigger experiment is not hypocrisy. It’s engineering. If you think some of the objective facts they’re putting out (like test coverage and performance) are lies, go and prove it instead of appealing to emotion.
What do you think one would have to pay to have flesh-and-blood engineers get a cross-language port of a codebase of over half a million lines with a broad test suite to over 99% conformance? I think it would be astronomically high, especially given that for this specific project your hiring pool is going to be limited to people who can get up to speed with Zig and JavaScriptCore right away (or you’re going to have to pay them for low output for a while as you train them). Also it would be literally impossible to do in 6 days no matter how much money you paid, so unless they’re lying about that it’s still something that couldn’t have been done prior for any price.
More handwaving about the LLM hype machine is incredibly boring and enough of it is spewed everywhere that whatever social good it was going to accomplish must have already happened by now. If you want to inject reality into the situation, talk about reality (like Anthropic is at least pretending to).
The hype machine is real and we will talk about it as long as it pleases us. It took decades to get rid of smoking in public places and restaurants, and the clankers will eventually fall, too.
Running an experiment and deciding based on the results is not hypocrisy, it's engineering, 100%.
Saying you have no intention of doing something then doing it is not engineering, it's being dishonest. He could have said "well decide when we see the results", why didn't he?
If he wasn’t willing to change his mind after he saw the results, then why would he do it at all? Can you explain the false motivation that you think he communicated in the original kerfuffle about this?
Why are you conflating "no intention of doing a rewrite" with his actual wording, "we haven’t committed to rewriting"? The latter does not at all indicate that there would definitely not be a rewrite.
Maybe he didn't think it would work. Maybe even if it does "work" they'll keep the zig version anyway. Maybe further study is needed beyond existing compiling/test-suite. Intentions and perspectives change over time, even only a few days, without dishonesty.
I'm guessing that if I said it ... that we have no intention of re-writing in rust ... that what I mean is "we have no intention of spending the extreme cost it would take to rewrite". When I discover the cost model is completely different that changes things.
Giving an opinion and making a commitment are different things, wording is important.
If you mean "we have no intention of spending the extreme cost it would take to rewrite" then say that, and it would be fine. If you instead say "we have no intention of re-writing in rust" you've said something very different, using a different set of words, which changes the meaning. Especially, if you say it directly in response to someone asking you whether you're going to rewrite or not like was the case here, and say that there's a high chance you'll just be throwing it away, to get the other person off your back. If then you go ahead and do it, expect them to call you out for it.
This is a very simple concept that can generally be understood by children at around age 4. Trying to cover it with vague terms and using the defence of "well I said I had no intention, and I probably won't do it but you see, I saw the results so I changed my mind so the chance was small but not zero", that's what a slightly older kid will try to do to see if they can get away with it, and as any kid discovers, that doesn't fly.
Okay, that's such a shallow take I'm going to try and explain it to you like you're 5 years old:
Changing your mind is okay, for example if someone said it was impossible to do the migration with current LLMs and it turns out they did it in four days, that person can and should admit they were wrong. That's not what he did though. What he did is say he had no intention of doing it, and then did it. That is lying. If he was testing and he didn't know if the change was going to be worth it, he could have said for example:
"This branch is a test, it's not a given it will work so until we see the results we won't decide if we'll be migrating or not."
He didn't say anything like that though, he basically said:
"We have no intention to migrate."
Why did he said the latter and not the former? Because he wasn't being honest, he was just trying to get people off his back, and so he didn't say what he was doing, the best for his own interest. We have a saying in my country: "it's easier to catch a liar than someone who's lame".
Also, before you come and say but he said he had no "intention" not that he wasn't gonna do it. A five year old might think that's a valid argument, but this person is an adult and we're all adults here, so it's not, it's equivocation and it's a logical fallacy.
> I am so sick of emotionally frail software engineers.
Then don't look in the mirror, you're probably being the biggest crybaby in this thread so far.
If experienced (in open source and corporate politics) developers would bet on Polymarket if the rewrite is going to be ultimately merged, which side would you bet on?
What would the emerging odds be? My guess is 19/20 in favor of ditching Zig.
I have followed many initial denials on a wide range of topics, not only rewrites, over the years. Like clockwork, most of them were lies.
Even if it passed the full test suite there are a ton of software qualities that are not captured by tests and I think it's unlikely the AI made the right trade-off in every such case.
* We haven't seen the benchmarks yet.
* It hasn't seen wide usage. Zig Bun has had tons of bugs ironed out, Rust Bun has a different set of bugs to iron out.
* The developers know the zig codebase well, they don't know the rust code base.
A good point. The business and marketing aspect of this situation can not be overlooked. The rewrite in Rust was a clear marketing opportunity, to maintain the LLM hype, that team Bun warmly embraced.
I don’t think the Zig project adopting a strict ‘no LLM’ policy affects the LLM vendors at all. How many developers are working on the Zig project itself that will (maybe) now not buy a Claude subscription? I can buy that this is a marketing stunt, but nobody at the top cares if a relatively small open source project doesn’t allow AI contributions.
I don't know about that. Zig's bdfl got significant mainstream press attention for his anti-LLM stance. Definitely enough attention for various LLM vendors to notice.
Based on their actions, I don’t think the LLM vendors take anti-AI sentiment very seriously. If anything they court it, though I think it’s more likely they’re just high on their own supply. I doubt the Zig statement had any effect on the thoughts of the people who actually sign contracts with Anthropic, who are mostly not engineers.
The marketing opportunity here is in promoting Claude Code, not giving a smackdown to Andrew Kelley (who vanishingly few people who throw around millions of dollars on AI contracts have heard of).
I would expect from 'astroturfing' that they were in some way paying people to recommend it. This just seems to be advice on how to recommend it for people who already want to recommend it.
it does tho is the thing, like if someone is fine with using a non-SOTA model then no, but those people are probably happy with deepseek or something cheap like that, if you feel you need to be on the absolutely frontier of commercially available that's OpenAI right now, they need to convince those people they are not too far behind if they are still only using Opus or enroll them onto Mythos.