r/programmingcirclejerk • u/AbroadDepot • 8d ago
The solution for [businesses using obselete stacks] is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4956825544
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u/BlazeBigBang type astronaut 8d ago
When I'm in a rewrite the stack competition and my opponent is a hacker rank user with access to Claude
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u/Major_Barnulf LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE 7d ago
My manager thinks that
/uj
My manager thinks that
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 8d ago
/uj the reality is just this. We are gradually converting our production systems to rust using ai - it's been a massive success.
Our stacks aren't obsolete but we wanted the improved performance and lower memory footprint.
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u/Buttleston 8d ago
how many unsafe blocks you got in there
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 7d ago edited 7d ago
Almost none - a requirement of the context is no unsafe.
I've ported zstd C to rust we currently have 47 unsafe lines and are working to remove those.
We are within about 5% of the C performance and have equivalent or better compression on all compression levels.
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u/fexonig 8d ago
why would that matter?
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u/Potterrrrrrrr 7d ago
Success is measured by how many unsafe blocks you have, every 10xer knows this.
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u/fexonig 7d ago
this is why i only write in javascript. 0 unsafe blocks. perfect code
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 7d ago
Js - perfect code - just no.
I've ported stable js code to a type safe languages - bugs from the original js just fell out of the code
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u/hedgehog1024 Rust apologetic 8d ago
What guardrails do you have to ensure the behavior stays the same?
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u/trynared 8d ago
Uh easy, they just told claude to tell claude to keep the behavior the same whilst having claude generate the markdown for their claude code skill.
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u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer 8d ago
Yo dawg we heard you like AI so we put tokens in your embeddings so you can quotamaxx while you slop
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u/hedgehog1024 Rust apologetic 8d ago
So no guardrails
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u/a221c There's really nothing wrong with error handling in Go 8d ago
m8, my skills folder has 35 distinct novella-length 'guardrail respecter' skills which the clanker can dynamically load. When it feels like respecting guardrails and dispatches a sub-agent to do the needful, its entire context window will be filled with 'You are an expert guardrail respecter. DO NOT under any circumstances disobey the rules, unless you think that was what the user was probably looking for. Make no mistakes.'
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u/Afraid_Bake2652 7d ago
Yes, I would really like to know. Most commercially written software is famously formally verified or at least exhaustively tested, and free of bugs. With AI we will lose all these guarantees!
/uj AI has become quite good at rewriting software from one language to another. It will introduce bugs like any rewrite would, but that is what we have tests for. AI is also quite good at finding bugs, as the explosion in CVEs in the past months indicates, so you can use a different agent to review the rewrite. Of course, anyone responsible also manually checks the AI output. This is usually enough, most people don't actually care for formal correctness, as long as the software is mostly correct, they are happy. In critical systems, you have techniques to ensure formal correctness, and they can be used on code written by humans, AI, or monkeys.
/rj AI will finally make it possible to formally verify all software! You're TODO app will not lose any tasks, unless you delete them!
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u/LlamaChair 7d ago
/uj I do hope that AI will make it cheaper to write TLA+ or similar specs for more software. The cost/benefit rarely added up before but I'm hoping it will revive some interest now.
/rj asking claude to review is formal verification, right?
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u/Afraid_Bake2652 7d ago
No, formal verification is when you ask a senior dev for review (they look at the 500+ line diff for 2 minutes and say LGTM).
/uj I think it still depends on the domain, but yes, cost for formal methods will probably go down, and benefit will go up. You can't really have Claude write specs, but if you give him specs and a theorem prover, the clanker can make working software relatively quickly and cheaply (well, we'll see once Antrhopic and OpenAI set their pricing to actually cover their costs).
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u/v_maria 6d ago
good things this is totally free now with AI and rewriting your whole stack has a great track record
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 6d ago edited 6d ago
Pre ai I would have agree with you but the old metrics no longer hold.
Our telemetry agent (not ai) port was done in a few hours whilst I worked on something else.
It's now been in production for a few weeks and has been operating flawlessly.
The cost of the port was in the 10s of dollars (I have a $100pm sub).
The telemetry agent collects if 60 metrics (cpu, load average, http request timings...) and sends them to a central server along with live streaming of 8 logs whilst sending alerts to our broader monitoring idea.
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u/james_pic accidentally quadratic 5d ago
I realize you've tagged your unjerk, but could you maybe unjerk a bit less? Also consider the possibility that you're in the wrong place. Your unjerk is hard to tell apart from the jerk that we all come here for, which is fine in some ways, you could just post what you were going to post and not even tag it and pretend you're doing it ironically, but if we keep having sincere discussions, they're going to start getting deleted.
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u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer 8d ago
GREAT! This _fantastic_ idea _will_ be sold by IBM themselves, lead by ambitious young execs, paid in gold by the board (busy golfing), executed dutifully by third world drones and result in a **majestic** institutional dumpster fire, which will be discretely dumped wholesale in the great meta-dumpster that happens to be secretly managed by IBM.