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Comment by josefrichter | Hacker News Reader

Why so much negativity? I find these projects interesting for learning purposes and exploring new ways. What’s wrong with that?

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Possibly:

1. Piggybacking established brand names (Postgres + Rust)

2. … without practicality nor advancement (e.g. this solves no extra problems)

3. … without trust (i.e. LLM-driven rewrite, with no capabilities to thoroughly review it)

I think people get easily upset when the title has high-signal names like Postgres, and the title touts it somehow, yet it’s obviously impractical for obvious reasons (short-/long-term practicality, social trust & network effect, etc)

Yeah, if the title was : Vibe coded SQL engine written in rust, I don't think much anger would be found in the comments.

But then its credibility would be abysmally low, which makes it undesirable for the authors.

Because it’s uncomfortable to see decades of work copied so trivially.

I can trivially copy any code even without an LLM though with a simple tool called rsync!

But that's the thing, without the decades of work, it wouldn't BE trivial.

Everyone is standing on the shoulders of those which came before. If LLMs allow us to combine the incredible decades of effort and knowledge and experiences that's gone into building something as great as Postgres, and take that and combine the experience and philosophy that has led to the creation of a language that potentially provides tangible benefits, and for far less human time and effort that it would have otherwise taken...surely something that should be celebrated as absolutely incredible?

But who is getting celebrated? The people who spent a lot of time on the original thing, or the AI rewrite that everyone now uses?

The people benefit from all human knowledge, future human beings.

if only we lived in such a world

I mean, all of it? Maybe someone born post rewrite will think wow AI made a cool thing but nobody is going whoa Postgres is made purely by AI?

Imagine the feelings of a dude who used to code in assembly and then some punk writes in c++ and uses gcc... decades of work wasted.

That is a completely different thing than LLM generated code.

They typically respect software licenses and thus comply with the original software's wishes.

LLM companies steal the original work and LLM users dont even know where the replicated code was lifted from or how it was licensed.

They have the source right in front of them.

can you enlighten me, what exactly do you learn from asking a llm to do a rewrite?

No, I can’t. The way you frame your question tells me you’re not seeking enlightenment.

It's a very fair and generous way to frame the question, considering you like seeing these rewrites for "learning".

I mean you can learn a lot. You can learn what's possible with less effort to build a proof of concept. It's kind of like you had another engineer do it for you, you don't completely learn how to do it yourself but you can still learn a lot with much less effort

You would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?

exactly zero knowledge gained. all former expert understanding is buried down in slop so it is inaccessible and will be completely inaccessible once slop-machine stops

You learn that you can build a version of Postgres that passes the tests and improves on these benchmarks in rust. You gain access to a codebase that does it which you can learn a lot from too. Definitely not zero like someone else said

well, it accelerates icebergs meltdown. so it helps...

Agreed, the negativity here is quite wild.

There are new power tools for our craft. People are experimenting and having fun with said power tools, and have interesting results that may be transferrable to $YOUR_PROJECT.

Doing things just because we can is a great reason for hacking around.

Kudos for the author for answering questions and keeping up resilience - HN crowd is not what it used to be (shakes fist at a different cloud).

I am concerned about the quality. Even a cursory skim of the code makes the code appear asinine. Unless the genius aspects of the code elude me.

https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b...

Yeah same. The structure makes no real sense and when digging into the code it reads like I'm the first human to look at it.

That's how Ai generated code is. I am almost convinced that Models are intentionally taught to write obtuse code because AI companies don't want us to write code at all

I'm too young but I imagine assembly programmers were feeling the same when automatic code generation by compilers took over. Very weird.

More that I got confused by the C function returning bool, not as an error value, but as a result, which is my fault for skimming it quickly.

I have taken a closer look at the code, and it seems superficially a somewhat faithful rewrite, not quite idiomatic Rust, but closer than I anticipated at first. I know there are non-LLM rewriting tools for C to Rust, and with a test suite to help, a rewrite to Rust might be greatly helped. The new Rust code does have some drawbacks in some ways, and there are topics I am curious about.

I guess there also were macro-assemblers before C, so it was a bit more natural.

Wow, I would love to read an interview series based on this!!

This is a (slightly more typesafe) transliteration of the C code.

https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/2e6578292a9184dcaa...

I don't really understand how "written by AI" and "for learning purposes" can ever be compatible. What exactly does one learn from typing "Rewrite this in Rust, make no mistakes" into a terminal?

How much token this would burn is of interest I suppose

Because it's a waste of token.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but chances are that nobody will use this in production, people will completely forget about the project in 6 months, and the project will be archived not long after that.

This is not the first one of similar projects.

People feel threatened by LLMs doing things well that they feel should require their skills and talent.

That's understandable but it's still a bit of a negative emotion that probably isn't very productive. Or very rational. This thread is full of people trying to argue that this can't be any good, shouldn't be any good, and is clearly going to end in tears. And obviously this thing passing tens of thousands of carefully curated tests that accumulated over decades suggests otherwise. It's hard to argue against that.

This probably is going to have some new issues. But it's an impressive achievement.

Irrational fear… that's why we all collectively ditched gcc and moved to that llm rewrite made in rust right?

The only one using feelings rather than reason here is you.

I can't see the achievement here.

100% of the tests passing, on track to be faster and more scalable. That's not a trivial achievement.

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