[tuckwat]

This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.

I know very little about Jared but his article yesterday, which I read, seemed appreciative of Zig. I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.

This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.

It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish. Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?

[0xpgm]

How is it unprofessional when it is simply someone giving their honest personal opinion on an issue that involves something that is valuable to them, on their personal blog nonetheless.

Is everyone a walking and talking brand now so that they have to always filter their words, walk on eggshells, hide behind corpo-speak so as to seem 'professional'?

More honest discourse is required in today's world, not less. It seems interactions online are becoming less and less authentic.

[ModernMech]

> Those people talked to each other. Everybody talked to everybody. The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

There’s a big gap between corpo speak and “stinky manager”. That’s nowhere close to professional writing. And he’s not giving us his personal opinion, Kelley is telling us the conclusion of the “grape vine” - he’s reporting on rumors and gossip, and agreeing with it.

[27183]

[flagged]

[em-bee]

he doesn't owe it, but his writing reflects on him and the project. personal blog or not, the writing shows his personality, and that in turn affects how comfortable i am using a project led by this person. if this was just one of many zig developers then it would not matter as much, but as this is the founder and leader, his personality has a major impact on the project as whole. especially in how it attracts contributors, and how long those contributors will stay around.

[27183]

Maybe it's just filtering for the right contributors? More isn't always better ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ebilgenius]

The kinds of contributors you "filter for" by acting like a petulant manchild on your personal blog are going to ruin your community and then your programming language and then blame you personally for all of it

[Ar-Curunir]

Yeah, and the kind of contributors you attract with this kind of writing are just assholes

[ModernMech]

He doesn't owe me anything. But his community deserve better than this.

[27183]

If they want better than that the fork button is up and to the right.

[ModernMech]

I mean you’re not wrong, the only power his community has is to vote with their feet, and that’s what will happen. We’ve seen it before in other languages where the BDFL had an unchecked ego problem. Others brought up Elm and Evan and I agree. We all saw how that turned out.

[orangedog]

He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

[27183]

> He's not operating personally as the leader of a major project.

What? So let me get this straight--if my open source project which I have given away for free becomes "major" (for some definition) then all of a sudden I have to filter my writing through some kind of average acceptableness test? Come on. [edit] It would be one thing if this was published on Zig letterhead, but it was the guy's personal blog...

[orangedog]

You have to if you give a shit about the community you are leading, yes. You're not operating as a private figure in that role, everything you do affects the community and it is blind or selfish to act otherwise.

[em-bee]

you have to if you want to continue to attract users and contributors. if you don't care about that then feel free.

[smohare]

There are fundamental realities associated to being a public figure or representative. When you are even privately held sentiments or actions reflect upon the larger organization. This reflection isn’t a purely social construct, but itself an acknowledgement of human cognitive flaws and biases that inevitably leak through to decision making.

For example, you don’t want the director of a science outreach organization to privately uptake all manner of pseudoscience, because they cannot be trusted to carry out the organization’s ostensible mission. When these sentiments come to light, said directory is morally obliged to step down.

A personal blog is definitionally public, ergo by extension reflects upon whatever organizations that person is a member of.

I say all this as someone that does not even feel the posted article is particularly incendiary.

[newaccountman2]

Why do we owe him the withholding of criticism for what he writes on his blog he puts out there on the internet in the hopes that people will take his side/adopt his opinion?

[nsagent]

Treat it as a data point and make your own decisions (he does back it up with several sources that indicate a workaholic mentality with that expectation for others). Hiding it ends up perpetuating the behavior unseen.

*Below is an aside that explains why I think it's better to air these things even if it seems like "rumors and gossip."

I know first hand how toxic some people are irl compared to their public persona. There was a professor in my department during my PhD who was known to be a slave driver, but there are no accounts of it outside of the department. We would have to warn incoming students about working with her, though sometimes they wouldn't believe it could be as bad as we said. I spoke with one of her students after she left the lab due to being hospitalized for exhaustion from overwork: the professor contacted her while she was still hospitalized and asked her to complete a task ffs!

[illiac786]

Honest and professional is not the same, to summarize. You can be both, but you definitely can be honest and unprofessional or even childish. Children are very honest for example.

[cheikhcheikh]

Did you actually read it ? "Stinky manager" "alreay writing slop before llm" and nore insults, cmon now...

[frollogaston]

Lack of corpo tone and style is nice. Bun's article on this had some nice technical details, but I got a whiff of salespeople speaking and stopped reading, can't stand it.

The content here is the issue. Bun converted their codebase from Zig to Rust, citing specific technical mismatches of Bun using Zig. The response is that Jarred was rumored to be bad at his job, Jarred was mean to people, and Zig didn't like dealing with Bun anyway because of their sloppy code. Maybe all of this is honest, but it's too convenient.

[neutronicus]

[flagged]

[tel]

It's also a language of distancing from personal experience and honesty.

Not saying you're wrong. Professionalism is an important tool for maintaining professional relationships. Lack of professionalism is dangerous to the point where it is reasonable for certain kinds of societies to begin to shun people who don't engage with it.

And, at the same time, a certain amount of emotional honesty can be really important to share, too. And that includes some amount of judgement and criticism.

It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

[newaccountman2]

1) If he wants to rant in an emotionally honest way, he can, but other people are free to prefer professionalism and call him out.

2) > It sounds like Zig's relationship with Bun is over. While Anthropic/Jason/Bun did not write a personal narrative about the end of that relationship, they absolutely were the initiators and could not have done this in a more aggressive way. It feels to me to be approximately the equivalent of moving out in secret and serving the divorce documents through your lawyer.

What a bizarre framing of the relationship between a software library and the language it's written in. Why would you even liken it to a marriage lolwtf

[swiftcoder]

Nah, corpo-speak is the original slop. The result of too many comms/legal inputs to a conversation.

Professional communication is direct, clear, and ideally courteous (but only to a point).

[neutronicus]

What is managing legal and PR risk if not professional?

[swiftcoder]

corporate != professional. Plenty of professionals who do not work in those highly risk-averse corporate roles

What's the actual risk here? I guess he could sue Andrew for slander, and then prove in court that his management style doesn't suck, and his code is not slop...

[neutronicus]

The risk here is that a deep-pocketed entity elects to forgo funding Zig development because they don’t want to sign up for this level of dirty laundry airing if things go poorly.

[reinitctxoffset]

Professionals worry, stay late at the office, and work hard. They care a great deal about the outcome, they care a great deal about the craft, they are fanatical about their responsibilities.

They tend to be willing to increase their accountability faster than their compensation.

They sometimes argue, use profanity, or otherwise communicate emphatically, that is the register of communication when something critical is on the line.

The best computer hackers and other technologists through the years were very often outspoken, plain spoken, and did not suffer fools gladly. In their own way everyone from Djiksta to Jobs to Gabriel to Carmack to Linus to Nagggum to jwz to Hotz, too many to count.

It's the same in law offices, hospitals, and forward operating bases in any military that ever won a war. It's the same on a construction site or in Mission Control in Houston.

This venomous pretense of decorum performed by people who ruthlessly optimize to minimize their accountability while maximizing their compensation subject to no scruples.

That's not being professional that's being a leisure suit con man. It is en vogue at the moment precisely because we are in an extreme low integrity regime.

[dom96]

Calling someone’s code “slop” surely isn’t professional nor courteous.

[neutronicus]

Nor is polemic against financiers.

[grayhatter]

it is.

If I call your code slop, I'm being professional and courteous.

The truth doesn't have a ethical value. Me calling your code slop might feel disrespectful, but it's less disrespectful than trying to pass slop off for your coworkers (or users) to use and deal with.

Lying to someone, and allowing someone who's supposedly your friend to ship slop is more disrespectful. If I wrote shitty code, and my friend didn't stop me, and I find out later he knew it was shitty code... that would be very hard on our friendship.

Unless you meant it's a lie to call it slop code. A lie would be disrespectful, but then again, we both know you didn't say that because it's not a lie.

[dom96]

Calling something "slop" is dismissive, vague and not constructive. That's why it's not professional.

If you want to tell someone their code quality is poor, then you better do so with specific things that is poor so that the person you are telling it to can learn and do better.

[melodyogonna]

Well, I can't think of other people more qualified to know when a Zig code is slop.

[kamikazechaser]

The wanna cancel Andrew and Zig by extension for hot-takes.

[mjr00]

> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig.

It is. It's also why Anthropic and Bun moved off Zig.

Zig is effectively a one-man show, and that one man has been making increasingly erratic decisions.

It's his project so it's well within his rights, of course. But when you're a ~trillion dollar company you don't want to get hit by a supply chain risk like this.

For Anthropic, it's better to nip this in the bud rather than invest more into the Zig ecosystem, where there's a demonstrated risk of the not-so-BDFL going off the rails.

[mawadev]

I think the blog post was cringe, but the part with relieving a burden stuck with me. I don't think its acceptable to have trillion dollar companies or companies at all sit on your neck using your project in a way you don't like and subtly influencing its trajectory just because they want to make money. License back and forth, but it doesn't feel right to me personally. Its like the guy who wrote the stuff that is used for the intrusive Intel IME. Now pair that with the tasteless LLM and AI narratives and you got yourself into a big dilemma.

Let's say you make a language and try stuff out but its used by facebook and suddenly you find yourself in calls solving problems for them but you never really wanted to end up in this situation or work with people from such in environment. Meanwhile the compensation/donation does not match the value they are extracting from your work. Hard to say, I'm very mixed on this.

[deagle50]

If he's so relieved that Bun/Anthropic are off Zig, then why trash Jarred? He should say thank you and move on.

What this looks like to me is Jarred sinned by selling to Anthropic (as opposed to setting up a 501c3 or whatever Andrew deems righteous) and now must be discredited.

[pixl97]

At the end of the day our personal feelings matter very little unless we happen to be the authoritarian dictator or we are the type of personality that gets other people to follow our cause.

In a more just society we setup the rule of law so when you pick a license you have the ability to enforce it without being completely destroyed by a larger entity. When you set your license to 'do whatever you want' then this is causality. You cannot interact with the world and expect it not to affect you, both positive or negative.

What does this mean for the future of the open source world? Not really sure there is a lot up in the air right now. Maybe more 'fuck you' licenses that scare corporations from using your software in the first place. Who knows.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig when it really just makes them look childish.

Antirez made a post equivalent to: you'd be a fool not to use AI to increase test coverage.

Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage given its adoption and time in development.

Their stance on AI is completely childish. They could benefit massively from it, yet refuse to even consider any potential usage.

It's one thing to try to stop PR spam. It's another thing to tie your hands behind your back and not even use it internally for the lowest hanging fruit where it could have major benefits.

They could use AI to triage potential real bugs from PR spam... but instead they just let real bugs go unnoticed for longer than need be because they won't even use AI to help triage...

[zeratax]

in what way is it chidlish to have a principled position like this? you may disagree, i def use llms. but andrew has clear reasons for why he doesnt.

[neutronicus]

Childish or no, anti-AI sentiment is ubiquitous and growing.

From a PR perspective there’s a lot to gain in the short term by picking the “anti-AI” lane. And you can always change your mind later.

[orangedog]

Surveys show that 60% of US adults don't like it which means 40% either don't care or do. I'd advise not getting your ideas about sentiment towards it from places like HN which are very biased and unrepresentative places of anything.

I find the anti crowd increasingly to be hateful and close-minded and it is disappointing because I have a lot of friends in it. There's a moral puritanism which gives people feelings that they are on the "right" side and thus any level of rudeness or hatred is justified and it only hurts their side.

[voidhorse]

I'm not anti-AI at all but to call people who don't want to use it "moral puritans" is laughable. It's hard to read that as anything other than a self-report on your own extreme nonchalance when it comes to the many ethical thickets surrounding this technology. While the possible benefits of AI in fields like medicine are promising, the concerns that a lot of people have about LLMs and the supporting infrastructure, power shifts, and more that have come along with them are diverse, serious, and completely understandable, and I can't imagine them being "puritan" to anyone other than those ruthlessly driven by nothing but capitalistic self-interest.

[newaccountman2]

I just don't see how it's different from the pre-LLM landscape, personally.

The takes I have seen about the "ethical thickets" all call out things that could have concerned the authors before LLMs, but which apparently did not.

[neutronicus]

I don’t disagree with your characterization.

But from a purely Machiavellian perspective I don’t see a lot of downside in courting this group in the short term.

[abc42]

Or perhaps it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations and the people with anti-AI sentiment are called "laggards". If so, their amount will likely be near zero soon.

This has happened thousands of times in human history.

[neutronicus]

Sure. That’s why I said “short-term” and “change your mind later”.

The thing about laggards is their money spends the same as everyone else’s.

[duxup]

Is popular sentiment a good measure for a decision? Anti lots of things have been growing at some points in history, including bad things.

[neutronicus]

My point is that it’s a non-decision. You can use AI later, when the models are better.

In the short term, you can address the anti-AI market.

[CrimsonRain]

It's ubiquitous among dinosaurs. Don't worry. They will be left behind.

[mchaver]

I am fine with people having principles and doing things their way. Not everything has to be a race to be the best. There are still plenty of people that appreciate traditional crafts. Anyway, if Zig+AI can be the next, greatest thing, can't someone just fork it and make it happen?

[laurels-marts]

No one cares enough of zig to do it, people will just continue moving to Rust and similar.

[kzrdude]

Well exactly, "Zig + someone using AI" can never beat Zig + someone who cares. A developer that cares about the project comes first, no amount of AI can change that. AI could be a good tool for a developer though.

[cognitiveinline]

People are doing the simpler thing: moving ecosystems more suppotive of their goal.

[AyanamiKaine]

> Zig on the other hand has embarrassingly low test coverage

And? Why would low test coverage matter. It’s not an indication of project quality nor does a high coverage mean an absence of bugs or errors.

[embedding-shape]

> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product

The article seems to be happy about the switch to Rust, that point is re-iterated multiple times in the article, and seemingly they were both awaiting Bun moving away from Zig and wishing for it.

[jdw64]

I feel the same way as you do. Honestly, even though it was well-packaged, I did find it a bit rude. But since I don't know their personal relationship, it's not really my place to interfere.

[conartist6]

The people who steal with AI and give no credit to the actual creative forces (that they are stamping out) are the fucking rude ones.

I just return to them the kindness they show me when they say, "You made this?? I made this!!"

[jdw64]

I understand your anger too. AI did steal open source knowledge, and I agree with that part.

But separately from that, I think it's a bit unfair to talk about the people associated with it in such a dismissive way.

In reality, humans aren't purely rational beings, and I can understand why the Zig philosophy and the Bun manager who joined the AI side might not have looked good from that perspective. But I think that's a separate issue from the emotions involved.

[embedding-shape]

> AI did steal open source knowledge

It's really sad to see my fellow FOSS enthusiasts adopt this very strange vocabulary from the anti-pirate people. No, no one has stolen anything, the knowledge is still out there. No, you cannot even "shameless copy" from something that is asking the world to copy from it. Literally the point for me and others is that what we put out can be used by anyone for anything, that's why we use FOSS licenses in the first place.

[em-bee]

you cannot even "shameless copy" from something that is asking the world to copy from it

yes you can if you do not honor the license that the original was released under.

that's why we use FOSS licenses in the first place

some FOSS licenses are intended to insure that the code remains open even after modification. that's used by anyone for anything under the same license.

[conartist6]

Fine, they're leeches. My problem is that if everyone behaved as selfishly as they do, there would be no more nice things for anyone.

[conartist6]

It's not just in the past, and my anger isn't just about what was taken, but the community-destroying use it is being put to: Andrew's job isn't to make a JS runtime, it's to sell the idea that coding is dead.

When he made it his job to sell that narrative, he declared war on me. It should not surprise him or anyone else that I am going to take the war right back to his doorstep.

[jdw64]

There are some points I understand rationally but find hard to agree with emotionally.

What I understand rationally is the claim that AI is destroying your garden and community. It's an undeniable fact that intellectual property and the associated disruption are happening. That's simply true.

But what I find hard to agree with emotionally is that personal attacks aren't always justified just because of that. I've also been affected by AI. I had to create a new homepage because the traffic to my technical blog dropped due to AI. Of course, there are also benefits. As a non-native English speaker, it opened up a new path for me to access good programming resources, which I couldn't easily get before. So I have both affection and resentment.

Still, I understand your feelings. Because for you, the emotional anger of having something you built destroyed without any compensation is real. Our situations are different.

That said, I don't think that necessarily justifies attacking individuals.

People often think of blogs and homepages as places to write 'personal stories.' But once they're made public, they carry responsibility. And Andrew Kelly is a public figure—his words spread easily. So there needs to be a certain level of responsibility when writing.

In any case, I respect your perspective

[alwaysbeconsing]

> Andrew's job isn't to make a JS runtime

Most likely too late for edit, but Jarred is who work for Anthropic, not Andrew.

[zeratax]

in what way were they team members?

[jdw64]

fixed it.

[iknowstuff]

The post has a lot of incel "well you're ugly and noone wants you anyway" energy

[embedding-shape]

I think the article kind of gives you the energy you enter the reading with.

My take away was closer to "This is what we tried, this is the sentiment they gave back, then this is what happened, here's what I think of Jarred's way of working, glad they now use Rust, good riddance", but then I also apply this slightly unholy strategy of applying charitable reading when reading personal blog posts, and I worship neither of these people, so might be why we got slightly different takeaways.

[enraged_camel]

>> I think the article kind of gives you the energy you enter the reading with.

No, not really. I know nothing about either of the people involved, and after reading the article I came away with an extremely negative opinion of the author. They are using their position as the leader of a language to attack and denigrate someone who used that language for years, donated to it, and eventually decided to move on.

[iknowstuff]

You’re not concealing your jabs at me very well. This comment reads just like the post lmao, no wonder you enjoyed it

[embedding-shape]

I'm not trying to conceal anything, nor did I say anywhere that I enjoyed the blog post either. With those reading abilities, no wonder the two of us got very different takeaways from the post itself.

[frollogaston]

There are mixed messages. This part might've been added on later in the conclusion: "While I resent Jarred for making Bun into an embarassment for Zig, ..."

[dom96]

Agreed. This article should have stuck to the cold facts, rather than a series of personal criticisms that you wouldn’t see written out in the workplace.

Sadly there are far too many open source developers out there who are far too comfortable writing like this. It’s one reason I have stopped being active in open source. You would be fired (or at least disciplined) from any reasonable workplace if you acted like this.

[em-bee]

you are right, to many people feel far to comfortable writing like this. but my reaction is to double down and be more active to counter this kind of expression and make it clear that this is not welcome. it worked with linus torvalds.

[dom96]

That’s a good attitude to have. Any tips for identifying projects which have leadership which does this?

[em-bee]

in larger/popular projects the reputation tends to eventually become public as we can see in this thread. for smaller projects read the discussions and responses to bug reports.

[pibaker]

> I now learn he's donated significant chunks of money to them.

Biting the hand that feeds you might make you an asshole. But sometimes you have to be an asshole to uphold standards and principles. I don't think Linus or Jobs would be known to produce such important technology if they don't care enough about their works to act crudely to people they consider substandard.

We can disagree with Andrew's standards of course. But saying he should not attack someone just because he took money from him is a weak criticism.

[NeutralCrane]

I think the point is that if you only voice your criticism the moment they are no longer funding you, it’s not upholding standards and principles, it’s sour grapes

[lins1909]

It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

[dataflow]

> It's kind of strange to not engage with any of the points made in the article. Unlike you, I don't think the post makes them look childish at all. I think it raises a lot of valid points and makes me want to use Zig more.

I know nothing about the drama here other than what's in the blog post, but these feel more like unnecessarily public personal attacks which don't really reflect well:

- a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective

- already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs

- their vague "sell some cloud something" business plan was a farce

[ZeroGravitas]

I also know nothing of the drama, but what I picked up from the first blog post was that even with access to near unlimited funds and unreleased god-tier coding llms from a trillion dollar AI corporation it was apparently impossible to fix a backlog of bugs in Zig code but it was possible to fix them by automatically doing a rewrite in rust.

I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

[asa400]

> So pointing out that the zig code was full of bugs because the author was doing weird stuff and ignoring advice, couldn't hire/retain any good Zig devs because he mismanaged people and is the kind of guy to do a full rewrite because that's more interesting than fixing bugs or learning the old tools feels like stuff he'd want out there in the public domain.

All of what you say may be true, but the point remains: the Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

People are allowed to rewrite their own software whenever they want to for whatever reasons they want, people are allowed to be "stinky managers" (Andrew's words), people are allowed to only hire people who want to work 7 days a week, people are allowed to only work on things that interest them, people are allowed to write crappy, hacky code in their project.

What business is it of Zig's that Jarred is (apparently, secondhand) a "stinky manager"? What business is it of Zig's that Jarred wants to run his own company the way he wants to?

Going after the guy's character after he decided he wanted to go a different direction is _incredibly_ petty.

It's so easy to deal with this like a professional: "Zig and Bun are no longer affiliated. I thank Jarred for his contributions to Zig over the years and wish him and the Bun project the best." or some variant of that. Bland and corporate, but who cares? It's done. Move on. Save the grousing for the DMs, keep on attracting new contributors, avoid alienating bystanders/potential contributors, build your project.

This post does nothing to burnish the reputation of the Zig project or its leadership, and in fact has the opposite effect. The message from the top is apparently "it's fine to be petty and vindictive".

[csande17]

> [T]he Bun project lead can do whatever the hell he wants with his own project. There is no objectively "right" path here, in a moral sense.

I think this is the exact point that the article was getting at in the last section. It is okay to not be very good at software engineering or people management! It is useful to know these things if you want to understand why the Bun project made specific technical decisions, but they don't make the people involved "bad people" in a more nebulous moral sense.

The lead developer of Zig is discussing these factors because the main technical decision was moving away from Zig.

[jstrieb]

I agree with the spirit of what you're saying: that many aspects of this post seem unnecessary. But I do think there are reasonable answers to your (admittedly probably rhetorical) questions.

Zig is a relatively young language with a small community, and Oven/Bun is one of few places that someone could previously have written Zig code professionally. It's therefore Zig's business to make sure that either it's a good place to refer community members for work, or that they don't explicitly encourage people to work there. Likewise, as one of the highest-profile Zig projects, the community's leaders were understandably invested in making sure it represented the language well.

I feel like I am exactly the target audience for this post: someone who uses Zig regularly, but hasn't touched Bun, despite being aware of it. While I would have proceeded differently than Andrew Kelley here in terms of framing and phrasing (and leaving out some parts entirely), I do think reading this gave me new information about Zig's relationship to Bun. The specific dry, professional post you suggest wouldn't have given me any new information at all.

[soerxpso]

> I can see why that might feel like an existential attack on Zig even if starts with a bit about how great Zig is.

The original post explicitly praised Zig, and seemed to be arguing more that Zig was a great tool for the initial version of Bun, but that Rust was better for their needs as Bun grew to a larger project with a larger contribution team.

That seems completely in line with what Zig claims its strengths are. Zig's response to "but memory bugs" has basically always been "Zig is not a language for a big tumultuous project that you're going to throw interns at."

[krupan]

It explicitly praised zig and then spent a long time implicitly damning it. The whole blog post said in short, "zig is awesome, but it's use led to endless memory related bugs in the bun code that we couldn't stay on top of, so we rewrote in Rust."

If you didn't catch that then I'm not sure we read the same article. I haven't gone past basic tutorials in either language and I was really starting to believe that zig must be worse than C or C++! After thinking about it for a minute I wondered if maybe the developer was actually, well, not very good. Andrew's blog post did a lot to explain to me the background behind this all. I really appreciated it.

[krautsauer]

> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred.

was the cherry on top.

[dpatterbee]

Those are not personal criticisms, those are all professional criticisms. There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

[dataflow]

> There are many people who don't seem to know the different between work and life and so they may conflate the two, but to me it's pretty obvious.

Nobody is conflating anything, you're just misinterpreting the same words with different meanings.

A professional criticism can, in fact, be unprofessional, and even a personal attack. These are not mutually exclusive.

> Those are not personal criticisms

You're using "personal" to mean "regarding non-professional matters", whereas others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves".

> those are all professional criticisms

You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

[dpatterbee]

Yes, professional has two meanings in use here. Professional as in relating to one's profession, and professional as in how one may be expected to behave when carrying out one's profession.

In my comment I was using the former.

I'm not really sure what you're on about me "misinterpreting" something. The author of the article claimed to not have personal criticisms, and I was pointing out that there's a standard interpretation of those words that is true.

[bananaquant]

> others are using "personal" to mean "regarding the individual person themselves"

Following your logic, we cannot critique anyone in particular ever. How absurd!

> You're using "professional" to mean "regarding the profession" whereas others are using to mean... you know, the opposite of "unprofessional".

At the end of the day, it is the same thing. Person does what is their job according to common standards.

Andrew runs a software foundation, and it is his job to make sure that behavior of one of related projects does not disrupt the stream of all donations or bury his project under a pile of slop submissions. Highlighting the technical dysfunctions of the other project is an effective way to show the differences between the two. Do you have a suggestion that would be just as effective, while being more "professional"?

[dwattttt]

"a stinky manager ... Just a total shit show" are examples I would reach for to demonstrate someone is not being professional.

[dpatterbee]

I don't know why choice of language is having such sway in determining what you view as professional. Maybe it's just a cultural difference but where I'm from people just use the words they need to to communicate what they're trying to say. If something's a shit show I'd prefer someone just said it rather than dancing around it with corpo-speak.

[threatofrain]

That's true, claims of professional dishonesty is a kind of professional criticism. Shall we begin discussing whether Jarred is the kind of person who makes up fake conversations about Andrew?

As fellow professionals in this field, shall we engage in this very professional debate about Jarred's honesty as a moral human being?

[voidhorse]

Maybe the only quoted text that I would read as a personal attack is

"already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs" and maybe "low empathy".

Just because the other bits are negative and not so nice pieces of feedback one wouldn't want to hear doesn't necessarily make them attacks.

An attack is often far more personal (making fun of you for aspects of your existence you can't control, touching personal subjects like families, etc). idk, maybe I'm just not soaked enough in the goo goo baby corporate saccharine LLM speak or something but this post felt tame to me, if a bit cheeky. Nothing but a thumb jab at worst.

[tomnipotent]

What points? All I'm reading is just a collection of emotional ad-hominems.

[dofm]

FWIW I was really interested in Zig and now I see that its lead developer is thin-skinned and bitter and has confused minimal criticism of his project with an attack on his person.

This is such a bad look and it's also flatly self-contradictory. He spends time in his conclusion asserting he doesn't have any personal criticisms of Jarred but he's fully happy to claim, reframe and repeat everyone else's, even criticisms he evidently heard in private.

You can also see that it was incompletely rewritten from a pure, personalised and personally-directed rant: "I noticed that you…" does not belong with the rest of the text.

Whatever the merits of Claude-driven rewrites (I suspect few, long-term), the article he is responding to has little to none of the vituperative quality of his own.

I think if it needed a response, and I was this angry, I would have written this whole post as a draft, filed it away in Apple Notes, and then posted "I have, yes, seen the article on the Bun blog; you don't need to send me it anymore! I will respond to parts of it in the future as and when they are particularly relevant."

Writing the response post can be valuable as emotional release or exploration. Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

[orangedog]

This entire thread puts me out on devs. I stuns me that there are this many people who either excuse or cheer on being hateful. Wanting to use a project becaues the author was this rude....what?

Just a complete lack of emotional intelligence. You do not treat people like this.

[asa400]

I've read some of your other comments in this thread and I completely agree.

It's dismaying how many devs seem unable to distinguish poor project leadership/communication from being a bold truth-teller "telling it like it is".

This is a major project lead demonstrating that if things don't go well between him and you, he's going to retcon your whole relationship, collect gossip about your company and management style, chastise you for your life choices (taking venture capital?), talk shit about your code and your project, question your moral choices, and then publish all of it.

This insistence on "being right" is really caustic. It's just ugly.

[guardiangod]

>Posting it in this sprawling, mean form was dumb.

Thank you for putting my thoughts in words I can never string together so well.

I too would just stash the letter in my ZFS dropbox and never let it see the light of day again.

The letter reads like a husband who was just served a divorce notice from his wife. The man is angry, and wants everyone to know that he is not angry, and he is very much not bothered by the whole affair even though he has misgivings since the first day of marriage.

The letter would be much more convincing if it has any technical rebuttal against the decision.

[franktankbank]

And I see AI maximalists circling the wagon.

[mtndew4brkfst]

I'm as anti-AI as they come and I mostly think everyone involved in this is making their respective projects and ecosystems look worse for it here.

Andrew was still way out of line in making many of the points included in this post, you don't have to be pro-AI to feel that way.

[tptacek]

The points in the article aren't great. It opens up personal and stays personal. As people in this thread have pointed out, several of the falsifiable bits turn out to be false.

The big thing though is, you get to the end of it and have to ask: why did this need to be written at all?

"It's almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article."

He does get that Anthropic is Don Draper in the elevator meme here, right?

[Semkas]

Anthropic's niche is that they're the preferred model for software development currently. So, the reason for them to care about the rewrite is obviously not because they care about Bun's stability, but because it is the largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities.

Every part of this saga has gotten an exceptional amount of attention on HN. HN is ostensibly filled with many people starting software-related companies, ie potential Anthropic customers.

[0123456789ABCDE]

most folks don't even know what bun is

the "largest real-world demonstration of Claude's capabilities" is sitting in local repos, built with the daily quota leftovers from corpo accounts

[xyzzy_plugh]

Unless you're implying that Anthropic is actually threatened by Zig here (???) and perhaps even is working to sabotage it, I could not think of a worse meme to reference. I honestly find your comment confusing.

[tptacek]

My point is that Anthropic does not in fact have a lot of money riding on whether or not they use Zig, or probably really anything else that happens with Bun. In the meme, Anthropic is Don Draper, and the author of this blog post is Ginsburg.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I think that meme is dangerous precisely because the shallow interpretation is the opposite of the one the scene intends to convey.

Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he's threatened by him. In the elevator Don is masking his insecurities, as he deeply fears Ginsburg's talent. His own creativity, and confidence, has been crumbling. It's all ego.

[tptacek]

Draper sabotages Ginsburg because he couldn't possibly care less about Ginsburg and is irritated to be saving his feelings by pitching two different campaigns when he knows he has it in the bag. I know the Mad Men wiki says otherwise, but 51% of Mad Men wikipedians are wrong about this: Draper is being honest in the elevator.

Ginsburg's tagline wins Jaguar! (Joan clears an obstacle to them winning it, but they still had to win it). It's the most important account in the history of SCDP. Don doesn't care; he's overjoyed just to have a good tag.

And then, of course, the insecure Draper interpretation makes absolutely no sense here --- there's no conceivable universe where Zig is at the top of Anthropic's mind right now. Which was the only point to bringing up the meme in the first place!

[threatofrain]

Yes, perhaps Jarred is professionally dishonest, making up fake conversations about Zig. That is the most salient point in the whole article, and Jarred shows up to simply post receipts with kind words and minimal commentary.

Would you like to discuss that point as a fellow professional in the field?

[tuckwat]

Do you have bias? I'm not saying I don't have some hidden bias but I have no skin in the game. I don't use Bun or Zig or plan to.

My reflection comes after reading Jarred's post yesterday, which I found interesting, and then Andrew's today.

I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone and the summary is:

> The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending.

[taybin]

Did you have a hard time picking that up from the article itself? I don’t see the point of asking an LLM to tell you what to feel about the article.

[ahartmetz]

I'm rather critical of spamming humans with low effort LLM writing as well, but getting a neutral opinion about a text seems like a decent use tbh - for lack of alternatives because you'd hardly ask a human to do it.

Conventions are still being made, and I think this use might end up being acceptable.

[bulder]

How is pasting an article into an LLM going to get you a neutral opinion? It'll be at best an 'opinion' that aligns towards the fine tune dataset used by the org that made the LLM. I'd rather people own their own bias and bring something into the conversation rather than act as a mouthpiece for a statistical median.

[em-bee]

i think only if you contrast it with your own assessment. just using LLM to get an opinion is bad. eg: after reading the article i felt this X. LLM says it's Y. then draw conclusions from that.

myself i found the article contained a bit to much personal criticism. the kind that eg. on hackernews would not be welcome. so i guess i mostly agree with the LLM assessment.

[mathisfun123]

an enormous number of people have never taken a literature class and in fact have no idea how to assess tone, diction, rhetorical purpose, etc.

[titularcomment]

I'm glad that you asserted that you do have potential hidden bias and say that you used an LLM to judge the tone of an article partly pertaining to AI usage in coding right after.

[vitorfblima]

Let me check real quick with ChatGPT if you are being sarcastic or not.

[lkey]

Edit: Ah, my brain's been fried by comments that say this unironically and I read this as sincere, thanks commenter below, and apologies commenter above.

[speedster217]

They are saying that someone who will summarize an article with AI is already implicitly biased. It's not about the AI, it's about the user.

[galangalalgol]

I think I have some bias. I like rust. I like using opus, I don't want to use zig, don't see the point for it, but I find it aesthetically pleasing. I don't use JavaScript I wish it would disappear. If I did ise JavaScript I wouldn't run it on bun. Some of those tilt me either way. I agree with the LLMs take on the tone. The result of the two posts is that I think Jarred is a poopyhead, andrew is a bit childish but genuine and I'd probably like him, and I still won't use zig or bun or JavaScript. I plan to keep using rust and opus.

[BigTTYGothGF]

> I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone

That's your brain's job, don't outsource it.

[lins1909]

Uhm, I'm very confused by the last part of your comment. You put it into an LLM to...understand the tone? Is that supposed to convince me of something?

[ToValueFunfetti]

They phrased it poorly, but from context it seems clear they intend the LLM as a less biased third-party measure of the tone which agrees with their own assessment.

[zeratax]

which they very much are not

[ToValueFunfetti]

Less biased? Maybe on political questions, etc, but this is a classic NLP task and I expect LLMs to be very reliable here

[lifthrasiir]

Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.

[lkey]

Using an LLM as a proxy for an 'unbiased' source of personal confirmation bias is perhaps the most common 'use-case' for an LLM.

[QuadmasterXLII]

I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.

[uludag]

Very weird indeed. People must not realize that you can completely change the response you get back from an LLM by how you ask questions. Any bias can implicitly be implanted in the question you ask and drastically modify the response. This is what I got Gemini to say about the article:

  The author’s tone in this piece can be described as brutally candid, deeply relieved, and unapologetically sarcastic.

very different from "The overall tone is deeply personal, cathartic, biting, and polemical, with flashes of humor and a deliberate attempt to soften the ending."

[dofm]

Not very different, mind you.

I don't really agree with using LLMs to do this but it correctly identified the attempt to soften the ending, which is to my mind significant in the whole piece; this person wants to repeat and frame unkind things he's heard, say unkind things, and then assert that he wasn't doing either.

[lifthrasiir]

Personally I don't think that matters, because the article is problematic enough when it can be read like ad hominem. Assuming that the question was phrased reasonably neutrally (but not necessarily free of hidden biases), the fact that LLM concluded so is an enough evidence here. Also as a non-LLM data point, I felt roughly same (especially the "softening" bit).

[alienbaby]

this is what worries me. I have friends that love what AI tells them about their personal pet 'thing' and how awesome it is. Yet not one of them has even tried once to get the AI to criticise it's own answers, and hence learn that you can trivially get an AI to make a convincing-_sounding case for any point of view.

I tell them to try, and they laugh at me as they roll their eyes and waffle on about 'tricking' the AI like its some kind of hacking.

[hoppp]

Bun is better in rust and they can finally break up their relationship.

It's not a happy breakup, but not a super sad one either.

[lkey]

Please, I'm begging you, and the people that scan across this comment: Finishing mastering reading comprehension; It will help you for the rest of your life.

I'm not snarking, this is a problem affecting 30% or more of the population here in the states, and it's getting worse because of tools like AI. I'm not judging you, I don't think you are bad or deficient people, but this externalsing of comprehension and trust is self-harm.

Worse, it will lead you astray in ways that you won't tie back to this core problem.

To use an LLM safely you must have the discernment to understand when it has fallen into sycophancy, folly, or madness.

[afavour]

> It's insane to me that Andrew thinks this post will somehow exonerate Zig

I'm not sure that's his aim here. I imagine he has been asked dozens of times what he thinks about the switch, what it means for Zig, etc. etc. and wanted to just address it one time, which is understandable.

The tone is... strong. I think repeating grapevine rumours about Jarred's management skills adds very little and probably could have been removed. But at its heart I see this post as example of a common clash: open source code hackers vs Silicon Valley "growth hackers".

Kelley is disappointed that a promising Zig project took VC money and went from his passion project's prime example to one that shit talked it on the way out. I get why he's emotional. I wouldn't have written it the way he did but I also don't think policing tone is beneficial for honest communication.

[krupan]

There are entire businesses built on sharing "through the grapevine" what management style and working conditions are like at various employers. People want to know these things!

Instead of posting on Glassdoor or whatever the latest iteration of that is, Andrew just wrote it out here (and linked to a forum to back up the claim).

[rkangel]

I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.

I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".

[neutronicus]

It accuses him of presiding over “a shitshow”, and basically seems to imply he’s a greedy narcissist.

So, yes, I find that line laughably disingenuous.

[pattilupone]

It reminded me of the Church of Scientology lashing out at a Suppressive Person.

[oompydoompy74]

Totally agree. This article really turned me off of ever using Zig for a project.

[hoppp]

I don't think he is attacking, he's just organising his thoughts publicly.

[threatofrain]

While organizing his thoughts publicly, Andrew says that the Bun team at large engages in outright fabrication. What do we think about that? Does Jarred and his team lie about professional matters to fellow peers in the field?

[hoppp]

Maybe their concept of fuzzing is different?

Jarred commented on the top that they use fuzzilli , which is a javascript engine fuzzer.

But zig has a built in integrated fuzzer!

Andrew must have been talking about the built in fuzzer because that's what is associated with zig.

zig build test --fuzz

[threatofrain]

The fact that Bun is the face of Zig owes to (1) its popularity in the relatively enormous web ecosystem and (2) that there aren't many winners in Zig. This means Bun leaving and rewriting to Rust, no matter how its phrased by any of the major parties, was always going to be alternatively reframed as one of the few major proponents of Zig leaving for Rust.

That's why this is a PR moment for Zig.

It's not because Jarred was a bad manager, one who overworks his team, a poor communicator, one who doesn't develop intimacy with the internal core team at Zig, an amateur coder, or a liar about whether or not they've been fuzzing.

[hoppp]

"The fact that Bun is the face of Zig"

I think this is the core problem.

I would rather see something like tigerbeetle become the face of zig, some project that is well written.

There is nothing wrong with Jarred's mentality because it gets the job done, but I would be also angry if I was represented by a project I don't like.

[whimsicalism]

Sorry just organizing my thoughts on your comment publicly:

This person is credulous and naive, and I should take care to remember that if I see comments from them in the future.

[hoppp]

I would block you so you don't get exposed to my naivety lol but I don't know how. But take note so you don't comment on me next time.

[hoppp]

I don't think it's an attack, more like a goodbye.

Andrew is happy bun is not zig anymore because it was not up to the level they would expect from a project that represents them.

[karahime]

Isn't this what makes it so strange, though? You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks. Linus used to do this sort of thing, but mostly to things that directly affected the kernel, and even that eventually led to changed behavior and a code of conduct.

The post disclaims the ambassador relationship, but treats Bun as having all of the responsibility of being an ambassador anyway. If Bun is in Zig's house, like the monthly meetings and the core team code review suggest, then somehow the outcome reflects on Zig. If not, then that's fine, but then it begins and ends at "They were a project written in Zig, and now they're not". He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".

[audunw]

> You didn't see K&R publish "so-and-so writes bad C", or Stroustrup decrying the Boost maintainers as hacks.

The world is completely different now. The VC fuelled culture was not as intense and LLMs certainly didn’t exist at all. Andrew calls out these factors explicitly.

> He can't have both "It's their fault because their code was slop" and "it's not my business".

Huh? But it was his business when they had a relationship. Seems he was trying his best to work with them while they were getting funding and Bun was interested in them. That’s the nice thing to do no? Even if you don’t like the partner.

Imagine if the Zig foundation broke the relationship from their side, that would have been much worse.

I don’t think Andrew was trying to say it wasn’t his business in that way. But in the end he couldn’t control what Bun did or didn’t do, and now it’s not his business in any way.

[karahime]

On the world being different now, you know, the post tries to make the case that it's not, and that the situation was also like this before LLMs. It tries to diagnose some deep root cause.

What I'm saying, though, is that if this were a Python project that were rewritten in C++ for speed, I think all of the above would be wildly out of line for GvR to write a teardown about how he tried to tell them how to write fast Python, but they were just too VC brained to listen.

It's not about the tone of the blog post. As a language designer, you already have complete control over what you want your language to be able to express, in a very literal and direct way. If he didn't like the Zig code of Bun, maybe that suggests that he's not putting the things he actually wants to be in Zig in Zig, or hasn't defined the separation between the language and what is written in it cleanly enough. Or, you accept that that's the beauty of it, and that poorly written code that runs runs.

It's not that in the end he couldn't control what Bun does, it's that he couldn't and shouldn't have been able to control that in the beginning, but the post is acting like he should have been able to assume direct control anyway.

[zeratax]

how is it attacking him for using a different product? except for compile times nothing here even indicates that rust would be a bad choice for bun

[krater23]

Before the post I didn't know what zig and bun is. I needed a llm to explain it to me. Now I think about trying Zig. So, no, I don't think it's childish. It reads like a engineer that knows which kind of people you don't need in your environment. I can feel every word he wrote because I know this situations.

[cout]

I got the opposite impression from reading the post. Perhaps this is a Goldilocks situation?

[jaredcwhite]

Since you know very little about Jarred, why are you not investigating all of the issues raised about how Jarred has run that project from the get-go?

It's not childish in the least for someone who does know the background to point out those issues.

[ignoramous]

> This entire article is publicly and personally attacking him for choosing a different product.

Well, TFA has a conveniently titled section "Addressing the Blog Post", that raises (setting aside speculation) some good points:

  The [Bun rewrite] blog post is ... almost like the marketing department of a trillion dollar company has a lot of money riding on this article ...
  
  There's a dichotomy being presented here where you have to either choose a "style guide" or a programming language feature in order to avoid bugs. The sleight of hand misdirects the reader away from the main way bugs are eliminated: by dedicating engineering resources to it ...
  
  [TigerBeetle] put in the time to find and eliminate the bugs, they make an effort to maintain a healthy relationship with ZSF, and Bun did not do that.

  The argument for shipping all the million lines of unreviewed code is that the test suite is good enough to catch everything. Then why are you saying you have so many annoying bugs in the Zig code? What happened to the test suite being sufficient to catch everything ...

  Performance increase is attributed to LTO, which Zig has supported for all of Bun's existence. It used to be enabled by default until we ran into too many LLVM bugs, all of which also affect Rust ...

  The post claims they were fuzzing their Zig code, while during our calls the whole Bun team told us that they were not fuzzing anything. This appears to be an outright fabrication.

  The blog post outlines a bunch of engineering work done to reduce binary size, to better make the case that "Bun is better in Rust" ... you were doing the engineering work that you should have done in the Zig codebase since the beginning ...

  I noticed that you neglected to mention compilation speed. Zig compiler project is about 600,000 lines of code - roughly the same size as Bun before the rewrite, and I'm clocking 16s to build from scratch with a clean cache, followed by 90ms for each subsequent edit with incremental compilation enabled. What are the corresponding measurements of Bun post-rewrite?

[antihero]

You really think people should hide their honest opinions about others because they receive money from them?

What an awful corporate mindset.

[simonask]

None of Human civilization would exist if the norm was to share your unfiltered opinions about other people. It has nothing to do with “corporate”.

It’s just so unbelievably immature, and I know of no other industry where this is common.

[defrost]

Don't call Australia uncivilised, kicking against the pricks is a national identity.

[gorjusborg]

I almost completely disagree.

Unprofessional? Maybe a little, but honest, and while the truth isn't flattering to Jarred, I'd say generally kind.

Embarrassing? Not from my seat. Andrew is just revealing the relationship dynamics between a principled programming language developers and pragmatic business users of that language.

I had already inferred a bunch that this post confirms based on the agentic port from forked-Zig to Rust. It's very nice to have suspicions confirmed.

[orangedog]

How can you say that a post which has the criticisms it does is kind?

[Aurornis]

> I'd say generally kind.

How is saying someone wrote “slop” and is stinky kind?

I can’t understand these comments that claim the article was generally kind, unless you and I read different articles with different words.

I legitimately had to go back and check that the article hadn’t been edited to remove some of the ad hominems

[grayhatter]

The answer is likely some form of different expectations. You expected the behavior not to be the topic. Where as I assume, other people are upset by the behavior of bun et al, and because this reply was somewhat measured, it seemed more polite then they expected.

I think you're assumption that it's 'filled with ad hominem attacks' is good evidence for that. I'd have to go back, and go line by line to be sure, but there are no ad hominem attacks. Ad hominem has a specific meaning: arguing against the person, instead of the argument. If the argument is about the behavior of a person, then unless one of those people is a party to the argument, it's exceptionally unlikely to be an ad hominem attack.

Argument: you can't trust the quality of the code $person produces. They mostly release slop code.

Neither are ad hominem: because words mean things. They're attacks against the code quality, and reputation of the subject. But they're not ad hominem. You may not like the opinion. But that doesn't make it an inappropriate attack against the person, the behavior and decisions they've made and the impact those decisions have had, are the topic of the post.

I guess technically, he takes shots at claude which no doubt wrote large sections of this? But I also would object to calling that ad hominem, and doubt that's what you meant?

Finally, even if I did agree the argument that the language in the blog post targets the speaker, more than it addresses the topic wasn't stupid, (I don't agree, it is a stupid idea). The social responsibility/contract to: never do anything publicly that might be considered an attack; was released when bun decided to comment publicly with disputed facts.

Oh no, someone wrote a blog post as a response and refutation to an otherwise unprovoked public post spreading what the author considers misinformation about something they care about?! Maybe they shouldn't have said anything?

How much politeness do you feel is owed? Why are the critiques enumerated improper? I'm honestly curious if you have reasons that I just can't see? Or if it's just vibes based? You don't like how it feels, and that's your objection? Ideally something like: this specific quote is completely off-topic, and exists not to express an idea important to the author, but near exclusively to insult a person. So that I can understand why you see insults that I can't see. If it's true, I can't consider it an insult.

Last question: would all your objections go mostly/completely away if every paragraph was prefixed by "In my opinion"?

[mattstir]

How is it kind to imply that by not going to university, Jarred was too stupid to think critically about his own path in life? Or just this in its entirety: "Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective."

We have very different ideas about what kindness looks like. Honesty and rudeness are not synonyms.

[conartist6]

"An unprofessional embarrassment" is exactly how I feel about Bun.

I don't get mad at people for standing up for their morals, I get mad when they have none. AI is an a-moral tech, and Bun is using it in an a-moral way: for team Bun the ends justify any means.

I'm on team Zig!

[Ar-Curunir]

Ok, then call out those aspects. Don’t call the lead a stinky manager who wrote shitty code.

Criticize the project and methodology, not the person.

[krupan]

Management style and code quality outputs are not criticisms of the person, they are judgements of the person's management skills and coding skills. Are we not allowed to do that? Or do we just need to use nicer language when doing it? I could agree with nicer language, but those were actually very relevant facts that were missing in the original blog post about the rewrite.

[bel8]

I would love to have an unprofessional embarrassment project like Bun on my portfolio.

[wegwerper]

Agree with you.

This behaviour by the commentariat here on HN seems more like a reflexive revulsion at the discovering of humans with ideals other than money on this globe.

This of course leads to strong internal conflict - it becomes harder to accept yourself not having any morals when confronted by someone pointing it out. Easily resolved by the ego by disparaging the boss of zed instead.

[tomnipotent]

Andrew decided to attack the person rather than ideas and positions. It's not a reflexive revulsion, it's an appropriately sized reaction to a blog post in poor taste.

> not having any morals

You don't agree with someone so you claim they have no morals. I don't have words for how stupid this is that anyone can so casually dehumanize someone over something so trivial.

[neutronicus]

I think he also wants to attack Anthropic by proxy.

[voidhorse]

People seem to have adopted very liberal definitions of "personal attack".

When someone criticizes you for things you could improve on that are within your control, it may be difficult to hear, but it is not a personal attack. Someone calling you a stink manager, and listing factors as to why (unreasonable expectations etc.) is not a personal attack.

Someone talking about the inexperience you used to have (being a beginner developer) is not a personal attack.

Someone listing your business decisions (taking VC money, etc) is not a personal attack.

Maybe the only comment in this entire piece that is remotely close to an "attack" is the bit about slop code, but even that, being about the person's work and not the person and aspects of their existence they cannot control or their personal lives, is hardly personal.

I find it really baffling that HN seems to be so sensitive to what's, in my opinion, a relatively tame post with maybe some prickly flavor (which imo is completely understandable given the complete nonsense that had ensured with Bun post acquisition and their very public, and I think unfair, negative portrayal of Zig, intentional or not).

[elktown]

No, it's embarrassing being obsessed with good tone to the point that people behaving badly should never be called out for it.

The article provides good background into how it got to this point - and it fits well with doing an opportunistic AI rewrite after being acquired by an AI provider.

[orangedog]

It is not about good tone it's about not being hateful and rude. Why is this that hard to pick apart?

Why do devs believe being rude is somehow a sign of honesty? They are orthogonal. This post needed none of the mean-spirited attacks that it contained to make its points. It is only hurt by the attacks as seen by the focus on "tone" throughout these comments.

[elktown]

It's all about tone. The original bad behavior is done without overt "bad tone" but if the response to it is spicy then the former is ignored and the latter is condemned despite being of lesser severity.

I can buy that it can be good corporate politics to not upset the superficial crowd that will immediately lash out on tone, but I will not judge someone rightfully reacting on bad behavior that they've been on the receiving end of.

Also, I didn't say being rude is a sign of honesty, that's you extrapolating.

[orangedog]

You can call it superficiality but there are just some of us who believe that treating people right is the core of this. You're viewing that as some kind of superficial virtue signaling but if we're not treating people with respect then there's not a point in doing any of this, it gets to the very thing that Kelley is complaining about.

[elktown]

[flagged]

[orangedog]

It's not about kid gloves. There is a ways of reponing to this which isn't this ugly. That's part of being a leader.

[Tadpole9181]

When did Jarred say anything but kind things to Andrew?

[voidhorse]

What you are asking for is a slippery slope.

The history of humanity is full of biting polemics and attacks on the character of others, just read Voltaire. Sometimes, attacks are deserved.

Yes, a world in which everyone is professional and "plays nice" sounds great but it also quickly becomes a mechanism for suppression of the truth. Not the situation here, but "decorum" expectations are sometimes precisely one of the functions that help bad people maintain power (consider how difficult it can be for minorities or marginalized people to speak truthfully about what's happened to them). Sometimes one person being blunt, honest, and a little rude is a necessary step in clearing ground for others to be more upfront about the bad behavior of individuals.

[mattstir]

The argument isn't to avoid calling out "bad" behaviour, it's that you can do so with a professional (or at least not actively childish) tone. Using phrases like "stinky manager" while taking multiple jabs at Jarred's personal and educational background (implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward) paints a weirdly childish yet elitist viewpoint. The blog post reads as vindictive, akin to something along the lines of "screw you kid, glad to be rid of you, and thanks for the $120,000 btw."

I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.

[elktown]

I'm sorry but I honestly think this is just being superficial wanting to push it through some kind of corporate speak filter to be able to stomach it.

> Using phrases like "stinky manager"

I would've used a worse adjective given the WLB tweet etc. Is it just because stinky itself has a childish tone to it rather than something like shitty? Or do one need to reach to somewhat open-ended terms like "questionable" to be palatable?

> implying by not going to university he was too stupid to think critically about his path forward

I read that as emphasizing the Thiel Fellowship part, not the lack of university education.

> I don't interact with Zig or Bun, but I certainly haven't been enticed to try Zig after this.

I'm so tired of "I've never played [game] & have never had any intention to play [game] whatsoever, but given [newfound-grievance] I wont buy it!"-style dismissals - talking about childishness.

[anon7000]

> This is unprofessional and embarrassing for Zig

This isn’t like the official stance of the zig foundation or anything. I for one am happy to see people being honest about their frustrations instead of playing politics.

[grayhatter]

> Or maybe he doesn't care, and just wants to attack Jarred?

I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.

I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks? They're distinct, and the context for the post. I'm sure he's been asked a few, hundred, times what's his take on this decision made by this single person.

> Two, I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will.

> That said I'm happy that our business interests are no longer intertwined! As soon as the Internet stops arguing in public about whether the rewrite was good or bad for Bun based on the language choice, I believe that concludes our interactions.

Translation, Jarred posted his thing, so now Andrew "has" to post his thing: hopefully so the internet will stop asking, and he can ignore this shit he doesn't care about, and people will leave him alone long enough that he can get back to spending his attention on his language, which is all he really wants.

[Aurornis]

> I've worked with ark enough that I think I've started to learn his default style, or at the very least to know that from him; this isn't an attack. If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.

You start by taking more from sources that aren’t this post, then in the very next sentence accuse the other person of doing what you just admitted to.

This article has very clear attacks like calling him a “stinky manager” from literal gossip, or saying he wrote “slop” before LLMs.

If you can’t see these as personal attacks, you are taking more from other sources and your predetermined opinions than the article. That is what you admitted, but I don’t think you realize it.

[Fifnmar]

Lmao when I can learn to master speaking like you;;

That said I have positive feelings about Zig as a project, but I do see it is a straight vitality show of a person rather than someone putting broader adoption in front. If Andrew K ever prioritized adoption he would have been a kind and dull leader keen on advertising here and there but he is not, he puts principles first, and people abide with him to see what he could bring to the world, not for being kind, so if people say they know Andrew K they are actually saying well he has that in his personality

[mattstir]

> I wonder if you're confusing statements of fact, for attacks?

Hearsay and gossip from the "juicy grape vine" along with implying Jarred is too stupid to critically think about his own path in life because he didn't go to university are not exactly statements of fact. They're elitist and vindictive, but those are not synonymous with honest.

> If that was your read, I think you're taking more from sources that aren't this post.

I'd encourage you to reread the post and try to catch how weirdly spiteful and inconsistent it sounds in places:

> But having graduated from the Thiel Fellowship school of thought rather than university...

> Jarred was a stinky manager. Poor communication, unrealistic expectations, low empathy, no experience. Just a total shit show, from an employment perspective.

> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.

> Now, it's not our business to police what our users do... We made futile attempts to guide them towards better programming practices.

[grayhatter]

Allow me to reframe what I'm trying to say. Depending on how much placation and linguistic sugar you required to tolerate reality; you might need to remember, or think of ark is an asshole, but then so am I. I'm going to speak bluntly and directly, if you shit out shitty code. I'm going to call your code shitty. I will use the word shit. If you're making decisions that follow a clear pattern, especially if I have a problem with that pattern, I'm gonna name it. Naming something by that pattern, might be seen as degrading, or insulting. That's still, not an attack.

It's an uncomfortable observation, wrapped up in an opinion you don't like. I'm sorry reality is uncomfortable for you (rhetorical you), but welcome to the club?

Let me try explaining it with an example: If I wanted to attack someone, I would directly call them, personally an idiot. Or some other clearly directed insult, at who they are as an individual. I wouldn't list, or trash their output, I wouldn't waste time stating I'm grateful for their time or donations.

No, hypothetically, if I wanted to attack someone I'd use the example of the no call no show to the meeting and say: wow Jarred and his team really are shitty people to no call no show on someone like that. I hate a lot of people, but even I wouldn't noshow on them. He sounds like a shitty human.

I wonder if there's something we can all learn about the subject, given everyone is so sure a recounting of facts followed by a conclusion saying literally

"I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred. He has different taste than me, he wants different things out of life than me. But I think he's actually happy and successful exactly where he is. He figured out how to accomplish all the stuff in life that he wants. [...] Honestly, I think he did well for himself, and I don't wish him any ill will."

is so clearly a personal attack? Honestly, if that were me, that would hurt way worse than reading this attack.

[Aurornis]

I agree and I’m confused that some other commenters aren’t seeing it.

> The grapevine was large and healthy and full of juicy grapes, and all those grapes contained the juice of the same message: Jarred was a stinky manager.

> Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs.

This isn’t about wanting “sanitized corpo-speak” or something, but I do expect leads of projects to behave like adults and not build arguments on ad-hominem attacks and rumors they supposedly heard.

Address the topic and put forth some arguments. I don’t care to hear your personal beef with someone aired publicly.