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Comment by computatrum | Hacker News Reader

It not only written in Rust, but they avoid basically any dependencies to third-party crates (beside the obligatory windows-sys/libc), optimizing probably for binary size. To achieve this, they seem to re-implement considerable parts of the rust ecosystem (own TUI library implementation, own unicode handling, own arena implementation, ...).

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I’m guessing this isn’t just to optimize for binary size. If you have the resources to avoid third party dependencies you eliminate the burden of having to build a trust case for the third party supply chain. That is the number one reason we sometimes reimplement things instead of using third party packages where I work: the risk from dependencies along with the effort required to establish that we can trust them is sometimes (not always) greater than just replacing it in house.

Microsoft has recently said AI writes 30% of their code. Reimplementing things isn’t as expensive as it once was.

That was absolutely not what was said. The way it was phrased indicates it only applies to a subset of projects, plus there were weasel words to indicate that maybe it's not actually quite that high, plus AI was not explicitly mentioned and it easily could include a lot of traditionally-generated code.

I ran across the dashboard where I work that is tracking Copilot usage. According to the dashboard 22% of suggestions are accepted. I assume Microsoft is quoting a similar stat. This is VERY misleading, as more often than not, the suggestion is trash, but has 1 thing in it I want for reference to look up something that might actually help me. I accept the suggestion, which increases that stat, but AI didn’t ultimately write the resulting code that went to production.

I took a glance around this project, and it seems to be really high quality Rust. I would be shocked if it was AI-generated to any significant degree, given my own less-than-impressive results trying to get LLMs to write Rust.

Edit: I see the author isn’t very familiar with Rust, which makes it even more impressive.

Maybe a tenth the total cost is getting the code into the terminal, the other nine tenths is maintaining way more code than you'd otherwise have to.

How much cost reduction does 30% ai written code translate to? It's easy to imagine that ai doesn't write the most expensive lines of code. So it might correspond to 10% cost reduction.

10% is nothing to scoff at, but I don't think it should factor into the decision to rewrite existing packages or trust third parties if you're very security minded.

AI-writing has the cost of human orchestration, debugging, review. Code is now cheap to write, but for there to be a net efficiency gain, those other tasks have to not bloat too much.

Microsoft has no metric to track this and I can guarantee you that statement is for marketing purposes.

I'd guess legal reasons

I'd say the windows crate is even technically first-party since the OS vendor publishes it

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