He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired | Hacker News Reader

He Rewrote Everything in Rust – Then We Got Fired

medium.com

15 pointswallflower28 comments

The detached, analytical tone (despite this supposedly happening to them), the simple character tropes, and obvious 'deeper message' are clear signs this is just a fable.

It's written by AI. I have made LLMs adopt the same tone by prompting to be engaging. Short sentences. Every point intended to land with impact. Artificial gravitas. I consider that a failed experiment and rewrote it, rather than posting to Medium

You can get LLMs to write in that tone, because it’s a common tone that people write in. Especially for LinkedIn and MBA essays.

I was half expecting it to end with "And Kabir's real name was Anthropic's Claude Code."

Kabir Kode, please.

This is basically the average rustacean's wet dream. But I can probably point out half a dozen reasons (without even thinking) why this wouldn't work in a realistic environment. Unless that one guy is literally a savant and the others are negative net contribution random monkey devs who were twiddling their thumbs all day at best. And in that case the end result would probably be the same, it has nothing to do with the specifics of this story.

https://archive.is/5Lsle

Can people not use Medium? I'm not making an account just so I can read something.

Add https://archive.ph/ before the URL and it will strip the paywall. But better to shun people who use Medium altogether.

As long as sneaking "archive.is/" (many mirrors exist) in after "https://" and it works, I'm not going to object. But I often do just click back because the effort of doing that outweighs the value of reading.

What a first-world problem.

prepend medium url with https://freedium.cfd/<medium_url>

> Rust didn’t fire us. But a Rust rewrite without team buy-in can change who the team even is.

Perhaps the most valuable paragraph of this sad story.

And the company now has a bus-factor of 1.

If it's true.

The story is entirely believable but would the guy who lost their job to write it like this? That is rare.

The story is too simple and unbelievable. It feels almost like a fable.

A rust-factor of 1 too

I've personally experienced how a Rust-factor of 1 can damn a project and a company's buy-in into Rust.

Like any technological investment, Rust has risk because you depend on people who know Rust.

There's plenty of people, internationally. But locally at the required level, not always.

It's a bullshit slop story.

But even if true, that's trivial to change hiring another dev (or Rust dev specifically) and giving it a couple of months to understand the architecture.

Statistically speaking, it is more difficult to hire Rust dev, especially with identical wage.

and then the whole company clapped

They literally do clap at some point in the story!

Don't get me wrong, its plausible, but like why was this one guy able to replace everyone? yes he was faster and junk, but like what the fuck were all of you doing?

How was he able to replace an entire stack in less than a month without introducing huge amounts of logical errors?

The "healthcheck" that is provided is just junk. It gives you app uptime, great, but that's _useless_ without context. Oh its neat, but also fucking pointless. I'm not a node person, but you can write the same thing is ~12 lines of node.

Is this AI slop with some rage bait sprinkled in?

> what the fuck were all of you doing?

Hotfixing fires caused by brittle software, causing more brittle software.

> How was he able to replace an entire stack in less than a month

There weren't hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

The conceptual model was already mature and well-understood.

So there was little new understanding to be gained, only fixing bugs in a second iteration.

> without introducing huge amounts of logical errors?

Supposedly by being a good engineer who tests things against the existing solution and new tests.

> The "healthcheck" that is provided is just junk

Yes, the whole story seems made up.

A moral of the story may be:

Build huts with mud, and skyscrapers with steel.

There are so many historical precedents to suggest that rewriting anything from scratch is extremely risky.

This story, while it may be fake, suggests that you shouldn't altogether abandon the idea and live in mediocrity.

As a person without a huge amount of legacy risk on my shoulders, I like that.

I didn’t read the whole thing because login but yes, firing the whole team thanks to one rockstar is the most braindead bit of management I have ever heard

Let’s say it’s easy to replace those people with Rust engineers (it isn’t)

Lets say there were no critical bugs introduced in a total rewrite (there almost certainly were)

Let’s say that morale among the rest of the org won’t instantly nosedive because a whole team got canned over architecture decisions they had no part in (it will)

Are we to believe that this unicorn 10x Rust engineer wont instantly be bored out of their skull because now that the team is gone there is no one left to maintain the devops pipelines, write all the docs and runbooks, and all that tedious stuff that any regular team handles?

How long until this rockstar unicorn ninja bails for another fun Rust from scratch project elsewhere?

Replaced by a health check! Anyway nice LLM drivel with whatever the standard linkedin system message is.

This is not just LLM drivel — It is drive by LLM drivel.

This is slop. It has all the signs, and there are enough yellow flags that I'm not even sure this is real and not some weird fiction.

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