1. Piggybacking established brand names (Postgres + Rust)
2. … without practicality nor advancement (e.g. this solves no extra problems)
3. … without trust (i.e. LLM-driven rewrite, with no capabilities to thoroughly review it)
I think people get easily upset when the title has high-signal names like Postgres, and the title touts it somehow, yet it’s obviously impractical for obvious reasons (short-/long-term practicality, social trust & network effect, etc)
But that's the thing, without the decades of work, it wouldn't BE trivial.
Everyone is standing on the shoulders of those which came before. If LLMs allow us to combine the incredible decades of effort and knowledge and experiences that's gone into building something as great as Postgres, and take that and combine the experience and philosophy that has led to the creation of a language that potentially provides tangible benefits, and for far less human time and effort that it would have otherwise taken...surely something that should be celebrated as absolutely incredible?
I mean you can learn a lot. You can learn what's possible with less effort to build a proof of concept. It's kind of like you had another engineer do it for you, you don't completely learn how to do it yourself but you can still learn a lot with much less effort
You would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?
You learn that you can build a version of Postgres that passes the tests and improves on these benchmarks in rust. You gain access to a codebase that does it which you can learn a lot from too. Definitely not zero like someone else said
exactly zero knowledge gained. all former expert understanding is buried down in slop so it is inaccessible and will be completely inaccessible once slop-machine stops
There are new power tools for our craft. People are experimenting and having fun with said power tools, and have interesting results that may be transferrable to $YOUR_PROJECT.
Doing things just because we can is a great reason for hacking around.
Kudos for the author for answering questions and keeping up resilience - HN crowd is not what it used to be (shakes fist at a different cloud).
That's how Ai generated code is. I am almost convinced that Models are intentionally taught to write obtuse code because AI companies don't want us to write code at all
More that I got confused by the C function returning bool, not as an error value, but as a result, which is my fault for skimming it quickly.
I have taken a closer look at the code, and it seems superficially a somewhat faithful rewrite, not quite idiomatic Rust, but closer than I anticipated at first. I know there are non-LLM rewriting tools for C to Rust, and with a test suite to help, a rewrite to Rust might be greatly helped. The new Rust code does have some drawbacks in some ways, and there are topics I am curious about.
I don't really understand how "written by AI" and "for learning purposes" can ever be compatible. What exactly does one learn from typing "Rewrite this in Rust, make no mistakes" into a terminal?
I'd love to be proven wrong, but chances are that nobody will use this in production, people will completely forget about the project in 6 months, and the project will be archived not long after that.
People feel threatened by LLMs doing things well that they feel should require their skills and talent.
That's understandable but it's still a bit of a negative emotion that probably isn't very productive. Or very rational. This thread is full of people trying to argue that this can't be any good, shouldn't be any good, and is clearly going to end in tears. And obviously this thing passing tens of thousands of carefully curated tests that accumulated over decades suggests otherwise. It's hard to argue against that.
This probably is going to have some new issues. But it's an impressive achievement.
1. Piggybacking established brand names (Postgres + Rust)
2. … without practicality nor advancement (e.g. this solves no extra problems)
3. … without trust (i.e. LLM-driven rewrite, with no capabilities to thoroughly review it)
I think people get easily upset when the title has high-signal names like Postgres, and the title touts it somehow, yet it’s obviously impractical for obvious reasons (short-/long-term practicality, social trust & network effect, etc)