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Comment by kburman | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake. After reading this, I'm starting to think I was wrong.

If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.

Today's AI-generated rewrites may not produce code that humans would consider high quality or maintainable. But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months. If AI is the primary consumer, maintainer, and refactorer of code, human readability becomes far less important than correctness, performance, and the ability to iterate.

This feels like a shift where software may no longer exist as a long-lived artifact in its current form. Instead of writing and maintaining applications for years, we may generate, adapt, and discard them continuously for each use case.

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> But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months.

At that point, even Bun itself doesn't matter. All intermediate tools don't matter if LLMs can reliably write something large.

The problem is that LLM is not quite there yet. The rewrite was only possible because they mostly stick to 1-to-1 translation resulting in non-idiomatic Rust code. So, what from there? I don't think they can really build up a sane codebase from that state. They only shot themselves with a bigger gun.

> The rewrite was only possible because they mostly stick to 1-to-1 translation resulting in non-idiomatic Rust code.

That’s patently false, just read Jarred’s own blog post describing how that was the first stage only, they went through many more to get the amount of non idiomatic, unsafe Rust code to an acceptable level.

Somebody checked[1], and they discovered that the "stages" past the first had minimal impact on the unsafe blocks count. That's just one metric, but it makes me doubt your claim that there was/is a lot of work put into making the translated code idiomatic Rust.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48967630

Isn't it just: "while true {refactorIdiomatically(); fixErrors()}"

/goal fix all bugs

That sounds like a massive waste of finite energy and compute resources.

That's like saying let's stay with horses.

We'll develop faster and better tech. We'll find resources to feed that. Use that to build better. Access better resources. We'll mine asteroids. We'll harness much more from the sun. The factory must grow.

Is that before or after the earths atmosphere acidifies for humans and our bodies can’t hold enough phosphorus or calcium for basic metabolic tasks? You have until 2050:

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11869-026-01918-5

these doom and gloom reports also said half the land will be under water by now and average temperature will be 40c. Didn't happen.

Earth is in a cooler period and it will get very warm. These crappy climate change activists will not get anything done but to hold us back. We need more power, more tech, and more abundance of things. We will need to engineer our way out of real climate change.

Don’t look up - or that hubris might crush you.

Oh we should certainly trust the opinion of the science denier. Surely his opinions will be based on hard data and not on feelings!

> I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake

Keep in mind that you are not Anthropic, and you'll likely NOT consider rewrite at all if you don't have unlimited budget

> Honestly, I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake. After reading this, I'm starting to think I was wrong.

> If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.

exactly. this wasn't a technical project. this was a marketing stunt that worked on you.

Some of what you’re saying is likely true but quality is something that will never be optional. There is quantitative data suggest that LLMs perform better on higher quality code base which makes sense. Code that is well organized and coherent will make better use of the context window.

Software refactoring and tech debt is absolutely where LLMs will shine as is evidenced by the Bun rewrite.

We are the ones to get to decide. Do we want that? I don’t. But im just a single data point

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