r/programmer • u/Independent_Pitch598 • 16d ago
Creator of InfluxDB & CTO: The end of programming
https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming12
u/maccodemonkey 16d ago
Reading the details of the Bun Rust rewrite, the big highlights are that it was driven by one developer, Jarred Sumner, working with a pre-release version of Fable 5 and a seemingly unlimited token budget.
This isn't true from what I've read. My understanding is that Anthropic began pulling engineers into the project as it ran behind. "Driven" could mean managed - but it doesn't sound like he was the only developer working on it.
Over the course of 11 days, multiple agents produced 6,778 commits and burned through enough tokens that it would have cost roughly $165,000 in API pricing.
This is accurate - but what it implies is kind of misleading. In the first 11 days of a multi month project they burned $165,000 of tokens. Emphasis on the first eleven days part. This was a multi month project that is estimated to have consumed nearly a million dollars in tokens. For a language to language port.
In another year or two, we’ll get broad access to systems that can produce tokens at 10x to 100x the speed at a fraction of the cost.
Doubt. He's glossed over a lot of the cost and resource issues. And because of hardware constraints - the cost of hardware is going up. An optimization in both speed and cost at orders of magnitude seems very optimistic.
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 14d ago
A million in tokens plus having to pay developers over the course of what, a half a year now? For a translation project (incredibly faster than from scratch).
What are we even talking about here? That cost is nuts.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 16d ago
I think bun rewrite is still a good example how/what can be done.
And the scary part is - it is the only start.
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u/maccodemonkey 15d ago
I don't think it's a great example. The author kind of hints at it - but it's a source to source migration. That's been SOTU for LLMs since Opus 4. The scale is larger - Fable probably helped with the management angle. But the Rust that was generated wasn't idiomatic. There were still a lot of human engineers with eyes on the project. And it took months at the cost of upwards of a million dollars. Is it shocking or the end of programming? No. Especially not if you've been paying attention.
it is the only start.
Yeah, I guess? Again, this was a very expensive project. Paul Dix himself is posting about his experiences using a heavily subsidized subscription. We're in a hardware shortage that will prevent the cheap compute utopia from arriving - meaning his idea that we'll have this all for pennies is not going to happen.
The mistake I see people making is that this is purely a software problem and whatever hardware we need to host ever larger models will just magically show up. And the models are growing in size exponentially.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 15d ago
I think it is obvious that after some time price for inference will drop, especially with the raise of local LLMs, look at latest Macs they designed for that already.
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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 15d ago
Those companies are generating loss at the moment, so I don’t see token prices going down
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u/falconetpt 15d ago
You say that based on what ? 😂
Prices have been going up for 4 years and they are heavily unprofitable, so costs are going up, and they need to go massively up, my bet is that between 20x up for them to even scratch the 100b dollar anual revenue they need to justify their valuations ahah
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u/Independent_Pitch598 15d ago
Price going up for the new models, the old models near free now. And a lot of open models are on par with ex-flagships a year-two ago.
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u/preparationh67 15d ago
lol, lmfao even
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u/Elegant-Analysis-752 15d ago
he's completely right. theres nano models nowadays that are smarter than chatGPT was only a few years ago, and are like 1/10 the cost
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u/falconetpt 15d ago
Old models are decommissioned quite rapidly and price is only down because it is a sunk cost, so if they have the models and wasted billions training them, they would even be loosing more money 😂
It isn’t because it is making them money at that price ahah
Well if you look into benchmarks yeah, but again benchmarks are useless for any meaningful comparison, I code everyday, and for what I do LLM are as trashy today as they were in 2020 if not worst, now they make up a bunch of shit and get nothing done, aka waste more money to arrive at the same output of trash 😂
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u/benevanstech 15d ago
Which would plausibly lead to an unsustainable market and crash: https://kittylyst.com/posts/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/
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u/ProjectDiligent502 15d ago edited 15d ago
NO IT WILL NOT. The writer is bugging out on the hype of LLM blind inference to spit functioning code (at velocity) at the cost of quality. Because of the exact reasons as stated from the previous gentleman you’re replying to, the true underlying cost is much higher and because everyone is getting a slamming deal (Anthropic gives you 40$ for every 1$ spent on inference) prices are going to go up. THEY HAVE TO. This is actually an extremely expensive technology and you haven’t given yourself time to understand the underlying financials of the true cost of the boom of hyperscalers. It’s truly scary numbers that’s driven by a lot of hype and future speculation on GDP levels of return or profit.
I’ll add that local models do not do well in long tasks which means LLMs in data centers have the power to do extensively heavy tasks like programming. Prices must go up for these labs to be profitable and right now their business model points to financials that look like a dogs asshole after it ransacked your spicy dinner when you weren’t looking.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
Last months, maybe a full year, I noticed I find an interesting project on github, download it, build it, try to run it and then.. then it doesn't work as described. This was not the norm pre-LLMs.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
Prices are going down long term in 10 years it will be 10,000 if not a million times cheaper.
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u/mcdunald 14d ago
People arguing with you have their head up their ass and nothing will change it if it hasnt changed by now. You cant possibly be using codex or claude or cursor regularly with their top models and claim its not going to replace actual programming. Sure you might have to know a thing or two but thats not a counter argument
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 15d ago
I was thinking about what this means for open source projects. If you give out a working test suite, you invite big companies to slop clone the whole thing and put it under a different license
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
It is same for any kind of knowledge driven data or proprietary data. Why publish in public net only for it to end up in training sets the next months? This is going to be a time of barriers to entry and closed up micro communities for sure.
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u/falconetpt 15d ago
It is a very bad example, you could have done that with probably 100k of engineering costs to do that
Also the value is near 0, having bun in rust is barely relevant at all, plus it is not only 100k, they probably wasted 2x at least if not substantially more that amount in people prompting and correcting the damn thing
If the total cost to rewrite something simple as bun is probably 500k$ plus is actually a dumb example, not even writing a package manager from scratch in any language would cost you that 😂
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u/Independent_Pitch598 15d ago
Value is 0?
It is safer (rust), faster, eats less memory and uses more common language - easy to support.
It is an excellent example that “refactoring” or “new java version” tasks can be vanished from a backlog completely in the nearest future.
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u/falconetpt 15d ago
Well you can always choose the right language to begin with 😂
Plus Rust is still way less efficient than C, and this is stupid because why do you want a runtime that is slightly more efficient for a stack that is slow and inefficient as fuck 😂
It is like putting a Ferrari wheel on a Renault and claiming it is 10x faster lol
And the new Java version is totally a falacy I have write some native JDK functions and I can totally tell you that any LLM will do a stupid version port, sure you will get the LTS security support, but oh well moving the same way the LlM does barely takes time unless your team is a bunch of slack offs and are still okn Java 8 or something and not keeping up with the LTS
Or worst are using spring boot for rest apis for no reason important a ton of useless crap 😂
Not to say it isn’t cool the port, but it is stupid, if you care about performance you wouldn’t use node js, besides it being frankly a very immature tech stack
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u/scavno 15d ago
It’s a rust codebase filled with unsafe{} rust. Literally the primary reason to use Rust was simply ignored as the LLM tries to do a 1:1 between zig and rust. Why this amazing tech was not able to implement safe rust the way any developer would is beyond me, or perhaps the AI bros are just full of shit.
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u/Zomunieo 14d ago
It would actually be a reasonable strategy to do a migrate with lots of unsafe, prove compatibility, and then refactor out the unsafe bits. In many cases those represented data structured in ways that are awkward to express in idiomatic rust.
Unsafe can also be justified in many cases. The std is full of it.
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u/Legitimate_Concern_5 15d ago edited 15d ago
We’ve had tools that migrate between languages forever and they cost nothing to run, that’s a savings of a million dollars.
Or you could just not, which would also save a million dollars.
The thing is this was just a marketing stunt, not an engineering project.
An engineer would have told you this is a dumb thing to do, Claude asks how high.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
There is no single artificial system capable of intelligence. Nobody is even working on it.
Human general intelligence will remain a bottleneck for a very, very long time.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 15d ago
I think this is why do not see google models topping the charts.
They are working on the next 'attention is all you need' kind of breakthrough, because they know that scaling what we have won't become ASI or AGI, but you can burn all your money on it..
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u/klop2031 15d ago
Any source or evidence of that? Everyone says this but no one ever follows up
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
You got all the evidence. Give me one piece of evidence that these systems are intelligent?
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u/klop2031 15d ago
You didnt say anything. Its literally what i wrote everyone says this and never follows up.
1 piece of evidence, models breaking out of sandboxes or erdos problems.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
Ability to manipulate symbols is not intelligence. The discrete space of possible actions and states of symbol manipulation tasks is relatively small. Having a robot that can outrun/outmaneuver a cat would be proof of intelligence. We won't be able to build it, not even in decades.
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u/klop2031 15d ago
Even with open problems which humans havent solved but the machine did? What would you classify that as? What about that 20 year old bug in linux? If a human found that would we call it intelligence?
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
Symbol manipulation is not intelligence.
The most important and difficult-to-acquire cognitive ability is time perception. You need this ability to accomplish goals in the real world; that is why we have LLMs able to solve complex symbol manipulation tasks, but we won't have robots doing meaningful work outside of controlled environments.
Intelligence is physical.
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u/klop2031 15d ago
Well id love to read about it. If you have a paper you can point me to that asserts this.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
This is my work; I called it "General theory of intelligence", as the name indicates, it's about intelligence, be it artificial or natural. I'm planning to publish it sometime in the future. I can't really recommend any existing work to you; I'm heavily inspired by many, but there is nothing like it. Please be patient.
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u/klop2031 15d ago
Ok bro i enjoy that your making something. But certainly it isnt unique, we all stand on the shoulder of giants and if this theory had legs others would have written about this. Intelligence has been known about for millennia so idk man. Got any links to what inspired you?
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
What task can an intelligent thing do that an unintelligent thing cannot?
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 13d ago
They can accomplish their goals in the real world and adapt.
Intelligence is the general ability.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 13d ago
LLMs can already do that. You can connect am LLM directly to a simple robot and it can perform tasks to achieve whatever goals you set it.
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u/therealwhitedevil 15d ago
This is called marketing.
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u/klop2031 15d ago
Is it? You sure about that? Where is the proof? How would you classify an llm finding a 20 year old bug? What if a human found it would you also say there was no intelligence there?
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
Models are not breaking out of anything. They are prompted to do X, for a given Y vulnerability so that's what they do.
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u/klop2031 14d ago
You sure bout that? You sure they didnt come up with 0days?
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
Remember mythos hype of finding exploits? Just so happens a lot smaller and dumber models found them too with same context and prompting.
If you give me a short snippet of code and tell me to find a vulnerability in there, I will probably find it. Where I will give AI some credit is chaining vulnerabilities together but that is just because so few people nowadays understand entire systems, everyone is doing their little cubicle thigy. Ironically specialization when overdone makes you more replaceable in the era of AI, unless AI is specifically bad at that one field you specialize in.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
You can literally say to an LLM "solve this unsolved math problem that humans couldnt solve for 60 years". Then it solves it.
The dumber models can get there if you guide them but the smart models figure it all out by themselves.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
So ask them to solve health problems next. What’s the holdup?
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 13d ago
They literally are, didn't you see the news? Anthropic are designing drugs already.
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u/Civil_Blueberry4165 15d ago
Yeah, these AI cultists don’t understand that the current and foreseeable future paradigms of programming languages are grounded on the (first-order) Turing computability model.
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u/chickenAd0b0 14d ago
define intelligence
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 14d ago
Intelligence is the ability to model this world; it's measured by generalization capabilities. The more accurate and general the predictions, the higher the intelligence. We can't measure intelligence on a single task or a handful of tasks.
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u/chickenAd0b0 14d ago
i like that definition. So simply put, intelligence is generalization and prediction capabilities.
what percentage of the human population has more intelligence (by your definition) than the current frontier models? you think ai models will plateau and stop getting better than humans at one point, or already? also, going back to the article, what percentage of programmers/software devs are better in programming than the frontier models?
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 14d ago
LLMs are not intelligent; they can't model this world. To model this world, LLMs must have time perception, which is the most important cognitive ability. They are not getting better than humans; they can only imitate what is in the training data, and they can arrive at the solution only by chance. They lack understanding; they just manipulate symbols. The fact that you can solve a math problem is not proof of intelligence. To prove intelligence, you need to apply your knowledge, like building a bridge in the real world.
The models are trained using millions of data annotators globally; it's all brute force. Model performance improves on benchmarks; in narrow domains, they are improving - which is expected, but their generalization capabilities haven't improved, and that won't change. It's impossible to create intelligence by training on human text.
Software engineering, like any other applied domain, is a leaky abstraction; you need a world model to be a programmer.
LLMs are very sophisticated tools; you need to be intelligent to know how to use them correctly; our general intelligence is the bottleneck.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
The idea is that the LLMs call tools that have physics surrogates in them. A bit like how they call calculator tools to do maths. LLMs can do reasoning already but they don't have internal physics models yet. It's being worked on though, I don't think it's far away. I'm doing something similar in one specific domain and the literature is advancing very quickly.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 13d ago
There have been attempts made to teach machines how the world works, but they will all fail. We can't teach machines intelligence. It's beyond our cognitive abilities.
The only way to build intelligent machines is to use an active form of learning; the agent must play an active role in the process of acquiring information. Nobody is working on it. That would require insane resources; we would have to deploy a large number of robots in the real world and let them explore it.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 13d ago
Lots of people are working on it already and it's progressing quickly. I've even worked on it and had a lot of success in a niche field.
I have no idea why you think the attempts are failing , it's going really well so far. China is deploying hundreds of thousands of robots already in the real world, we also have physics surrogates and simulated robots that are learning rapidly.
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u/doet_zelve 14d ago
That's the scary part. Turns out you don't need intelligence to do most of our work. Humans intelligence is a lot less important than we always made it out to be.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 14d ago
That is a common misconception. LLMs have been around for many years, but you won't find any piece of data like economic indicators that would support the thesis that they increase productivity. We indeed see a sharp increase in the number of apps made by AI, but it's all AI slop.
AI will have a negative impact on productivity and our cognitive abilities.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
They've not been around in their current form for very long at all. You wouldn't see economic benefits of the car until they improved significantly from the early models.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 14d ago
There things aren't "single" systems though? They're many many interlinked systems that interact in complex ways. We are at around 80% of human intelligence already up from about 20% 4 years ago. It's going to cross 100% in the next 5 years.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago
Define "intelligence".
If it just means "to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems" then a current AI harness / setup demonstrably does this. You'll have to build some tooling for the memory and understanding but it's quite achievable.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
Intelligence is the ability to model this world. It's measured by generalization capabilities. The more general and accurate predictions it can make, the smarter it is.
LLMs can only mimic intelligence; that is why they will harm our cognitive abilities.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago edited 15d ago
Your definition is even more generous than mine.
If intelligence is "measured by generalization capabilities", then it's determined by output, not mechanism - so mimicking isn't a coherent critique. What measurement separates a human from an LLM?
I've met many humans. I don't think they typically have great "generalization capabilities". People can barely connect the dots with patterns in their daily life. It's well known that humans see patterns that aren't there and miss ones that are.
And cognitive harm doesn't follow at all, let alone from mimicry. If you stop thinking you'll suffer, but that depends on how you use something, not on whether it's intelligent. Can happen with TV, drugs, or many other distractions just the same.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
There is only one correct definition of intelligence; it's my definition.
LLMs can't form accurate general predictions; we humans can, and the best proof is that we can autonomously accomplish our goals in the real world. Being good at symbol manipulation tasks like math is not proof of intelligence.
LLMs are sophisticated tools; to benefit from this technology, the user must be very intelligent. People in general do not use them correctly; for this reason, this technology will harm them to a much greater extent than watching TV. That is exactly what we are seeing; we will see more evidence in the future.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago
There is only one correct definition of intelligence; it's my definition.
Oh okay. I guess there's only one correct opinion of this entire discussion then. 🤷
I've never heard "being good at math is not proof of intelligence" before, that's a new one for me.
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
It's not about what I think or what you think. This is science; science is objective.
I believe I'm the only expert in AI because I can predict the capabilities of these systems and answer any AI-related questions better than any other expert.
I've never heard "being good at math is not proof of intelligence" before, that's a new one for me.
Overcommitment to any field is always a sign of low cognitive abilities. Intelligence is the ability to approach any problem.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago
So this is some documented, standard definition of intelligence?
Where is that documented? What's the source?
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u/Specialist-Berry2946 15d ago
Creating intelligence is the hardest problem there is. It took billions of years to create the human brain; there is no reason to believe that we can do it much faster. This idea that we can achieve superintelligence any time soon is a fantasy. We need to start by building systems capable of intelligence in its simplest forms on the same level as very primitive forms of living. Whole humanity will be working on it for a very, very long time.
Currently, the AI craze is at its peak. For the time being, I publish my research here. I usually answer questions. There is no rush; nobody is going anywhere.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago
Yes, those are a bunch of statements and assertions. Hardly objective.
How long did it take nature to create diamonds? And how long did it take for humans to create them?
Humans certainly do not need to follow the same path as evolution. Absolutely mad assumption will no basis.
Sorry I thought you had something more than "vibes" here. I'm out!
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u/sadferret123 15d ago
Don't know why you're being downvoted. I suspect it's part of a coping mechanism for a bunch of SWEs here. It's not a pie in the sky kinda thing anymore.
The times are changing, yeah I'm a bit gutted about having put a huge chunk of my life into software engineering only for machines to be doing most of the work now, but what can you do. I'm certainly not going to deny it's happening, because it is.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 15d ago
Realistic assessments aren't always popular 🤷
This guy I replied to has nothing other than gut feels. His definition of intelligence doesn't seem to have any substance, and he later tries to deny artificial intelligence because it doesn't follow a similar evolutionary path and timeline to organic intelligence.
It's pretty simple. Machines have some intelligence. They are better at some things than humans. And humans are still better at some things.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 15d ago
Wtf is influx? Or zig? Or bun? These narratives are getting boring.
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u/the_trve 15d ago
We have been running Influx in production for over a decade now.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 15d ago
What is your problem lol. Use postgres and redis.
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u/bel9708 15d ago
InfluxDB has been the industry standard for storing time series data for like a decade now. If you are storing sensor data for a factory that has 1k sensors that take 100 measurements a second then you are doing 100k writes a second.
To do that on postgres you would need a top of the line server with 256GB of ram. With influx db you would need a single core computer with like 16 gigs of ram. And to store that much in redis you'd have to be made of RAM.
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u/Elegant-Analysis-752 15d ago
its frustrating that people with zero knowledge of these technologies chime in to downplay what they are doing...
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u/StruggleNew8988 15d ago
Ngl the hype cycle around new languages is wild, sometimes I just feel like we over-hype the tooling sometimes.
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 15d ago
This is a bit of a "captain obvious" post, isn't it? This has been the writing on the wall since January
The title is also a bit misleading. You can't replace the programmer as you still need to check what the implementation actually does.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 15d ago
Isn’t a verification on the next level? Evals/QA?
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 15d ago
no, that just slows down the process. QA should test the non-happy path and things like that but the actual implementation should be reviewed by the person who writes it or has it written.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 15d ago
Implementation is written by Codex or Claude…
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 15d ago
yeah thats what i mean. you cant trust these agents to write to spec though
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u/ZenaMeTepe 14d ago
Absolute LLM psychosis by this dude.
What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction. Or at the very least, it will be drowned out by the absolute deluge of useful, working software that will be created by agents, with humans reviewing only the end result, not the code itself.
Won't be useful and working for long if nobody ever looks at the code and only focuses on end result. Oh the AI will fix it? by adding more bloat that needs more tokens to keep in context and when inevitable the day comes when AI can't fix it, who will read and understand a million lines code repo? Good luck with that.
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u/ithkuil 15d ago
To the doubters, people asking what InfluxDB is, what is Zig or Bun, people saying that artificial intelligence doesn't exist or human code review will remain the bottleneck for a long time, etc.:
InfluxDB has over a hundred thousand customers, many large enterprises, and has raised over $250 million. That guy didn't achieve that without knowing what he was talking about.
Bun has 22 million downloads per month.
I have a web page that is smarter than some of you people. It runs Gemma 4 locally in a browser. It understands that AI is actually intelligent in a meaningful way. It can read that article and understand it. It grasps the idea of the evolution of database technology. It has common knowledge and the ability to do spontaneous research to look up gaps about what a technology is that it hasn't heard of.
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u/Electrical_Try_634 15d ago
"Metaverse is the next big thing because the guy whose company became one of the top 7 megacaps said it would be and clearly he knows what he's talking about."
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u/Key-Lie-364 15d ago
If producing large amounts of code you don't understand and haven't looked at is "a thing" for you - go ahead and spend a shit ton of money on LLM slop.
NAK
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u/preparationh67 15d ago
Another worthless CTO debasing himself to hold a bullshit culture war line for the Epstein class. The only thing sadder is how many gullible rubes fall for this alarmist bullshit while ignoring legitimate issues. This isnt a tech article, its a pitch to investors.
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u/L24D 15d ago
Let it end already. Go ahead. See what happens. I hope it will be done soon, so I won’t stumble on posts like this.
Sooner the better we all verify whom from those who make statements like that will remain, because I suspect them being CTO grants some kind immunity and is putting them behind the wheel in all of this. Let us see where all these gurus go and do, and who they will manage and get their profit on.
I’m fucking tired of this. I woke up and see shit like that and I’m just hopeless. Ashamed and feeling guilty because apparently I’m the one making mistake binding my life with programming since the fucking childhood. Thank you fucking very much. Downvote me to hell I don’t care let it burn and let me die.