Clojurians Log v2

If you don't have the context, DHH is spoken about averywhere following his announcement at RailsConf last week that HEY's backend has be rewritten from Ruby on Rails to Rust, all by AI, without DHH looking at a single line of code.

Yesterday he also posted that he spent 10$ worth of tokens having AI rewrite Basecamp’s backend to Rust on his personal 20x subscription. (He didn't claim (yet) this is going in prod.)

Haha

classic

We're so going to see memes rise following this...

Obviously marketing 5D chess

I mean the slides from that talk literally had slop mistakes in them. So. 😬

As a Hey customer, I can't say I'm thrilled.

6D checkers

There is an interesting angle to this. At least in this benchmark Ruby was one of the most token efficient languages and Rust one of the worst. https://martinalderson.com/posts/which-programming-languages-are-most-token-efficient/ For stable code it might be non issue tho.

Me neither, I was in the course of checking for an email about an event I wanted to add to my calendar that's for later this morning. I can live without it. Still, the Hey app was the fastest of any app in my life to eventually show me a link to the status page, and the status page had the investigation already displayed, which I've found usually takes dozens of minutes before a company’s status page is updated.

Yeah, the token economics are injecting chaos into our decision making!

He claimed something like 99% less CPU and memory usage though? At that difference, it’s hard to argue with the economics of it. Although, perhaps this is because it wasn’t actually running any code.

My problem with that number is it mean the code must be atrocious

Ruby uses an insane amount of CPU

Yeah, I don’t know. Like when they revibed Bun into Rust, and someone actually looked into the original Zig and found that it wasn’t that great to begin with. Zig -> Rust was more of a slop -> different slop conversion.

I’ve kind of been tracking various rust outages over time. There’ve been a lot. Given tons of people vibe-coding into rust b/c they believe the static typing guarantees are so strong that it keeps agentic processes out of errors (and that they get low-level speed & goodness out of it), it’s not clear to me whether the cause is: • just sample bias, a lot more rust-linked outages can happen b/c there’s just a lot more rust code out there now, real error rate in rust code bases (or the vibe-coded subset) could be greater or lower or the same • rust static typing feedback loop actually makes many empirical tests & hardening slower for agents & human engineering teams to work through • people cargo-culting rust for its guarantees b/c they think they’re magic protection and don’t understand the actual scope of what a provable wiring diagram provides vs. provable domain correctness and robustness at scale, esp. in the noisy mess of modern web infra Some combination? which dominates? no idea maybe some combination of all three? 🤷‍♂️

Yeah and who knows, I guess they might publish a post-mortem about it showing that the cause was more about the fact that they recently changed the nature of their backend services than it was about the rust app itself. It's true that when we make big changes, we expose ourselves to a variety of risks.

https://x.com/aaaronson/status/2104964245934768251?s=20 > COMPLECTING is the longest word that can repeatedly lose a letter until it reaches one letter, forming a valid word at each step neat little claim

HEY being down is represented as an orange color... orange like rust? 😁