Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ndr 25 days ago
It just an anchor. If it were 50k would you say the same down to 25k? And if so how many more times would it apply?

The interesting thing is that it was manageable solo (in many ways it's _more_ manageable solo+AIs than with coworkers+(their)AIs), and in such a short amount of time.

2 comments

Original RSL library is 36k LoC. And this is C++. Rust should be like 50% smaller, that is, 18k LoC. This library is so big that I bet the author has no idea if it works or not. 1300 test generated by AI say nothing about actual quality.

In the end it is just a lot of unmaintainable code quickly generated by AI.

This is uncharitable, but makes a prediction. I imagine you'd bet the author won't be successfully using this, at MS/Uber or wherever they are, in a year time?

Rust makes no promise of being terser than C++, and RSL does less than this considering the optimization.

Also it's only 45/50k LOC so not so very from the 36k LOC.

Yes, I would bet it won't go anywhere.

The blog post mentioned the project is 130k LoC multiple times. Where 45/50k LoC comes from?

>Rust makes no promise of being terser than C++

True, but Rust has no header files, this alone is a great LoC saver.

50k LOC wouled be the rust code without tests.

But it's not apples to apples because they seem to have done much more performance work though, this is far from code golfing.

RSL’s 36k LoC includes tests and should be compared with 130k LoC, not 50.

Having 90k LoC of tests for 50k LoC codebase also a problem. At least in my experience LLM generate too many tests. It does not evolve test suite but throws more code into it as development happens. Unless I aggressively refactor tests I quickly end up with a test suite that I don’t understand. Then LLM modifies tests to “make code work” and I have no idea if this is a legit edit or LLM cheats. I wonder if the same thing is happening or about to happen with this codebase.

Has Rust code generally been found shorter than C++ in practice? I don't see an obvious reason for it.
I see no reason for Rust to be shorter than C++,. when using latest standards.
the interesting thing is how fast it becomes unmanagable.
Also that, I suspect that's correlated to how practical is to have multiple people (with their agents) iterating on it.