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Comment by jbonatakis | Hacker News Reader

> I have never written any line of Rust before in my life

As an experiment/exercise this is cool, but having a 100k loc codebase to maintain in a language I’ve never used sounds like a nightmare scenario.

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I think the plan is for Claude to maintain it. He hasn't read a single line of code.

code that no human will ever read or understand, sounds like a good idea

We don’t read assembly either any more. The sexy new programming language for 2026 is English.

Do you review and approve plaintext plans in your org and ship whatever output Claude outputs that passes the CI to prod without further review? Because that's what we do for assembly.

I think the point is that's where all the big tech companies say we're heading. I can't say I endorse it, but the OP who just left it running for a month seems to like it.

> We don’t read assembly either any more.

Speak for yourself? In absolute terms there are probably more people reading assembly now than in its heyday.

Moreover, assembly isn't generated, it's compiled, which is a completely different (and more reliable) process than generating source.

You are mistaken. People totally do read and write assembly.

You can determine and justify the reasons why generated assembly is generated because it's made by a deterministic machine. How is an LLM's output deterministic and justifiable? How can one hold anyone to account what spews out by a large language model?

you don't think that's where we are headed?

Oh no doubt, but the people who want that are wrong.

I kind of expect that code to be full of non-idiomatic Rust code that mimics a GC'ed language...

Once that's also "fixed", it may well be a lot faster than the current Rust version.

That isn't what I've seen. It seems to use every language in the way idiomatic for it, or more accurately, in the way it has een that language be ised. Rust written that way isn't present in it's training corpus so it doesn't do that. I would be more concerned about it getting creative and adding something a cool rustacean might add in the porting process that you don't actually want.

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