Comment by jazzypants
6 days ago
Honestly, I fully support the rewrite to Rust, but he should have just owned this from the start. I'm sure he knew in the back of his mind how dedicated he was to that branch as he had already spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars in tokens by that point.
Bun was VC funded and acquired by Anthropic. He's spending company money, not his own money.
That's why I said "the equivalent of". Additionally, time and cognitive effort are not free. The work spent on this branch was work that was not spent on other branches. Does that make sense?
6 days is also nothing when you're doing R&D on your company's dime. He could have spent a month trying a dozen different things and thrown away all the code at the end. As long as he ends that month with a clear picture of where to steer the company over the next 5 years, it's time well spent.
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Not even the company is spending money. It’s their employee working on a rework of the code owned by the company that owns the infrastructure on which the rework is done. And that company is still yet to turn profit. This work is subsidised by everyone who pays for Claude.
Announcing the decision a week earlier wouldn't help anyone. Maybe he expected it to work (though he didn't say that), but there's no reason to make a final call before seeing that it did work.
Fair enough. I didn't say anything about a "final call". It just feels like there is a middle ground between that and telling people they are overreacting.
Yeah but with no guarantee that it was going to work, why should he have?
Yeah, but he obviously had enough confidence in this project to keep the agents working at it, didn't he? Given infinite time and money, if you prompt an LLM about something enough times, it will eventually work.
Insert something about monkeys, typewriters, and Shakespeare here.
He was 2 days into a project that ended up taking 6. You're being extremely unreasonable.
But you didn’t have to sit and type. Assuming that you look at what it did, why not?
But he was just working along and someone else outed his branch, right? Dude doesn't owe you any sort of explanation.