Comment by lins1909
2 days ago
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.
> 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
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.
> 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".
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> 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."
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> I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred.
was the cherry on top.
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.
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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.
What points? All I'm reading is just a collection of emotional ad-hominems.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
Bro lol is this like your first day on the job? The faux "brutal honesty" as a personality trait is what smelly antisocial computer nerds have always been known for. Just ignore them.
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>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.
And I see AI maximalists circling the wagon.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Let me check real quick with ChatGPT if you are being sarcastic or not.
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.
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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.
> I just pasted this article into an LLM to understand the tone
That's your brain's job, don't outsource it.
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?
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.
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Reality check. The confirmation that the author is not alone in having this particular feeling by using an LLM as a proxy.
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I guess they use an LLM to work out the tone of prose they read. These are strange times.
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:
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."
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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.
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.