Comment by hn_submit
7 hours ago
Why is everyone calling LLM generated code "written from scratch" with almost no clue that they didn't write one line of code themselves? Yeah, it was written from scratch, but not by you!!
Projects like these are defiling the programmer's guild.
ArtCraft says it’s all written from scratch as well.
ArtCraft lies. It makes extensive use of crates, which to me defeats the "from scratch" argument. The whole point of doing it from scratch is that you get full control of every line of code in the compiled binary.
https://github.com/rfgplk/micron.cpp
This is an example of a true "from scratch implementation" (as long as you target the freestanding compile option, hosted still depends on pthread for threading). Absolutely zero external code or references anywhere outside the stated repo. (Not even compiler builtins or includes are needed). You can drag and drop it wherever you'd like hit compile and you're done.
"Written from scratch" just means that no external code or existing libraries were used in producing something. Nowadays it's preferable to reusing code/crates/whatever because a) you avoid supply side attacks b) the implementation is likely going to be more correct and performant than alternatives c) it's actually easier to write your own thing than to download an existing lib and wrangle it into your project.
Why does it matter? Tbh at this point if frontier models are used I would place more trust in the average codebase than the average pre-AI codebase.
There are outliers where an excellent team of devs produce great quality, better that even frontier LLM code now. SQLite comes to mind. But it's easy to forget that is the 0.x%.
the comment isn't even about the quality, it's about the "from scratch" aspect (used to 'market' it)
But isn't that correct? It doesn't seem to be based on anything, or am I missing something?
Or is it "To make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe" kind of deal. Which doesn't make sense to me either.
6 replies →
What does a vibe-coder say when he orders a dish at a restaurant and the waiter brings it to the table? "Look at the food I made!"
On the other hand: many managers love to claim to have been deeply involved in the development of some product when the actual work was done at least by their underlings, or sometimes even a completely different team.
If people were similar confrontive in calling out such managers ...
Or any project of any size -- scientists running a lab rarely do the experiments or data analysis themselves -- they have graduate students and postdocs for that. Their job is to decide what those people work on.
2 replies →