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Comment by yoyohello13 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe there are just so many of these but at this point for vibe coded stuff like this I’m just like “who cares.” LLMs can make stuff like this now. Unless this reaches some critical mass of usage among developers why would I use it? It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation. The more important question is “what does this teach us?” And idk the answer to that one.

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For me it removed all the fun to play with whatever projects are announced in HN, now it is all AI generated, why bother.

I don't understand why. Aren't the ideas and results the important parts?

Not without the craft. We could use a Star Trek replicator then.

And what's the problem with the (theoretical) replicator? Wouldn't it be better if more people got what they wanted and there was less scarcity?

If they still had jobs, yes.

What ideas? This is just an AI rewrite.

Would gold be valuable if anyone could create it at will? Sure, a few people would like the colour and the way it shines, but most would be indifferent. A lot of these things were cool because we knew they were difficult and had technical challenges to overcome. Now it's easy, I just don't care.

In this case the idea here is ‘rewrite tsc in Rust” not exactly earth shattering. If somebody hand wrote that, then they could have gleaned some new insights about Rust or Typescript or something which could be interesting, but in this case they just had an LLM do it and didn’t even read the code. So it’s a big who cares. If it gets adopted by the official compiler team, then I’ll be interested. But right now you would be an idiot to use this for anything mission critical.

When people post AI projects with genuinely new/interesting ideas, then I am interested.

I think the difference here is that the original motivation for choosing Go over Rust was that Go was easier to port TypeScript to.

LLMs change the calculus a lot, the result seems faster, and it's possible that the TypeScript team might want to change directions. It'd be a big deal, but I bet they'll at least discuss it.

There is a long interview with Anders Hejlsberg here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cywK3XYYJ2o&pp=ygUbYW5kZXJzI... where he talks about that, in short from what he said 1-2 months ago, I doubt that they will change directions.

Given the Typescript compiler rewrites that keep popping up, Next.js has one, this is another one, Angular just announced they are also going with theirs, eventually there will some community pressure on how the team will proceed.

Note there is already a feedback post from them (currently top one), that they will need to react to this.

Do we know why? Is there some hole the official one isn’t filling? Seems like having 10 different compiler implementations would be a portability nightmare. Now I can’t guarantee my typescript is going to run the same on node/angular/whatever

Yes, one hole is no longer being able to just integrate the Typescript compiler into other tools.

The team has posted reaching feature parity with broken workflows past 7.0 release.

https://blog.angular.dev/an-update-on-angulars-typescript-7-...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/announcing-typescr...

It teaches us the Rust community continues to be relentless in their efforts to rewrite virtually everything in Rust.

Isnt the guy who made this a typescript developer?

Yes. This has nothing to do with people trying to rewrite things in Rust for fun. It's a part of his development project that I'm sure will get a video in the future.

It got a video before it hit HN

I don't think the author even knows Rust.

Generally building something is not about "What does this teach us?" but rather "What can this be used for?". You don't build a house and as "What does this teach us?". It's honestly almost a perverse question to primarily ask for something that aims to have practical value.

The clear reason this has worth is that it's much faster than TSC.

That's why the commenter said

> It’s just a less maintained, less tested implementation

Then they asked if it teaches something because it is a risky utility to them. You're trying to make it sound a lot weirder.

The point is that it's clearly not just a less maintained, less tested implementation. It's 1.61x faster for one in real world apps, in some case even almost 4x faster.

I am curious why it's faster. Golang isn't that much slower than Rust, aside from the garbage collector. 4x performance improvements is much bigger than what I expected.

If that was your point, why did you spend a whole paragraph saying "teach us? What a perverse question."

The comment I responded on put forth a generic argument that implied if we can not learn from it it has no value. That is what I was responding to.

HN is going to be a weird place to be between people loving AI and the loss of loving tech. I don’t remember last time I watched a good tech dev video. At least the video game industry is a little bit shielded from this but soon it will be the same when we see the speed AI is advancing.

No more joy crafting things as a dev…!

I don't see at all that this is stifling love of tech. Sure if you liked to engage in language wars or vim vs emacs or tabs vs spaces then yes that's over. But tech as we know it is currently exploding, a ton of stuff that simply was not practically possible before is now possible.

Give us some examples of things that were not practically possible. Things are practically possible if the time or money is wisely spent, even if it takes a human a bit longer.

Money and time are precisely the point. Things are not practically possible of a X would cost 100K to develop and it's worth was 30K. But now that it costs 2K to develop it is suddenly practically possible.

1. A person building alternatives to photoshop single handedly: https://gizmodo.com/someone-vibe-coded-a-free-knockoff-of-ad...

2. The abundance of game decomps and recomps becoming available. Literally dozens of example in this space.

3. Reverse engineering of obscure software. A ton of oppertunities lie here.

4. As this posts indicate, severely accelerating existing software by re-writing it in language that are not terrible for performance.

5. Analyzing large volumes of unstructured information.

6. Creating one-off engineering and scientific tools.

7. Beating essentially all traditional Linux distribution, see Omarchy.

8. A personal example: I'm remaking the engine of an old game commercial game in rust.

I'm honestly a bit taken aback that this question is even asked. The volume of software is exploding and the power of the individual has increased a hundredfold.

I guess I’m just perverted then.

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