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by coldtea 13 days ago
>Reminder that the Bun's Zig-to-Rust rewrite took 11 days with dozens of agents working 24/7 and the author put the cost they'd pay (if they had to pay) at about $168k.

For an entity like Anthropic that's not even the cost of a single developer for a year. It's closer to what they pay a chef on premises.

That the showstopper for a better Claude agent is that they'd need to pay $168k or event $1M or even $10M in costs, can't be used as an excuse.
3 comments
jbvlkt 13 days ago
Lets see what happens in the future. From my experience cost of maintaining this amount of shitty code explodes pretty quickly. We will see in a few years if SW development in all phases using agents is that much automated and easy as people now predict.
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hluska 13 days ago
Do you know their entire roadmap? If not, maybe different people prioritize things differently when they see their full strategic position.
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coldtea 13 days ago
How is that relevant to my response?

The argument I responded to argued that cost might be the prohibiting factor. I'm saying that for them, the costs mentioned are negligible.

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pdimitar 13 days ago
I didn't claim that the cost is the prohibiting factor at all. Obviously they gave Jarred free Fable access and to do as his pleases. The cost was an FYI tidbit and nothing more.

What I argued was that you seemed to have been arguing an extreme point i.e. LLMs can one-shot stuff in any PL and that it does not matter in what PL they'd rewrite Bun.

If I misunderstood -- my apologies.

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coldtea 12 days ago
Well, I never said anything about one-shotting it.

What I said is, those AI companies push LLMs as the replacement of programmers, that can do everything code-wise, say their programmers "don't write code anymore" etc.

So how come they can't have the LLM write something better than "react for cli" for their flagship agent product?

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pdimitar 12 days ago
My only half-decent guess: they deem it too big and risky and believe they'll lose revenue while working on it and ironing out remaining kinks.

Claude Code is likely not well-specified and it's a product of rapid iteration and now nobody really knows how the whole thing works. LLMs don't do well when requirements are muddy.

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pdimitar 13 days ago
I don't work for them and I don't know their priorities. I can only speculate they're not okay with it but no idea why exactly.
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