Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

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> And, naturally, I also happen to think Rust is a really good fit for agentic development

To me this is a sad development. AI skynet slop is winning. Does any real human, aside from the fanboi faction, really love "agentic programming"? That is to use prompts to autogenerate text that is source code? I find that both sad and horribly uninteresting. I also stopped reading AI slop generated descriptions - they are just spam, babelfish 2.0 if you will. When I know that the human behind that text, was too lazy to write it himself or herself, why would I want to read that text? That's just a waste of my time.

> But I think Rust is popular for another reason: because Rust happens to be a really good fit for agentic coding.

Ok, so Rust is the perfect language for bots. Wasn't the original idea to be a great language for humans? What is the point here if AI slop auto-generates everything? Why would you need a human here?

> Rust is designed to give “good performance by default”, making the idiomatic thing typically also be the fastest thing. But another key part of Rust is that you have the knobs to eke out better performance when you need it.

Ok but why does this then not apply to C, C++, Java, C#, D? These can not be used rather than Rust? And you also should not run into memory issues with C like pointers - after all, AI skynet slop should generate bug-free code in C or C++ too. So I don't get why Rust would be THE ultimate slop language here. To me, if AI works, then any language can be slopped down.

This reminds me of the incredibly sad presentation DHH gave on a rails-conf, aka now slop-conf, where he spoke about how AI will win and how Rust beats Ruby hands down and he only AI-slop-spams now (busy on Omarchyslop). These people don't have a "vision" that is decoupled from AI - they are businesspeople and promo-people, convincing you that AI slop is the future. To me this is very sad rather than ... "exciting".

Yes, there are many real world programmers who like this. And yes, many who are distressed at this. I find both aspects in myself. As a programmer, I much enjoy having agents write in languages like bash scripting or SQL that have a lot of quirks and I don't use frequently enough to be proficient with. But I miss programming in my favorite languages. I also see AI devaluing skills I've spent decades honing.

> Does any real human, aside from the fanboi faction, really love "agentic programming"? That is to use prompts to autogenerate text that is source code?

I don't love it, but it's my job now and I would prefer keeping it.

I'm not breaking any new ground with the project I'm in - just serving our users and there's a lot of stuff requiring improvement that would normally take a great deal of time to finish if it weren't for LLMs.

For my own things I would rather not use LLMs, but it's tempting, considering how little time I have for such activities nowadays.

"Aside from the fanboi faction" kinda feels like a pre-no-true-scotsman. What would it look like to you for someone to enjoy it but not be a fanboi? One programmer I really respect has said to me that "LLMs have made programming fun again", and I also find that they are really good for dealing with the kinda tedious parts of programming, the kind of thing that would tend to kill or limit my hobby projects. Does that qualify us both as fanbois?

I don't think "to use prompts to autogenerate text that is source code" is a complete description of how agentic programming works. A very important part of the process is that an agent will not just write code, but also explore documentation, write tests, run those tests, and even do fairly complex integration testing up to and including (for UI based work) firing up a UI and visually confirming features work as intended. Agentic software engineering can be quite powerful properly applied.

> To me this is a sad development. AI skynet slop is winning. Does any real human, aside from the fanboi faction, really love "agentic programming"?

I really love it. It takes lots of tedious work (find which obscure function to use in obscure documentation) and I can focus on more creative stuff: algorithms, design, research.

Yeah, the big part all these "my language is the best for LLM", miss the part that any language in the world is one paragraph away in a markdown file to describe what the generated output should be.

Also there is the part that why not generate machine code directly, where some always jump to answer "but non-determism!", well we have survived thus far with non-determinism in JIT compilers, tracing GC implementations, PGO metadata outcomes in AOT compilers, integration of machine learning in optimising compiler passes, how shader code executes in actual hardware,... the determinism ship is long gone.

So yeah, sad state of affairs, however the pandora box is open, is like Assembly devs wishing that compilers would just be a fluke and everyone would be shortly back into macro assemblers.

Rust is fast, both at run and compile time (both important for the speed of the agent loop), its nazi compiler excludes many categories of errors that LLMs might make, the compiler's helpful error messages give precious hints for the agent to iterate upon, it's relatively new so not encumbered with half a century of legacy cruft with obsolete syntax, it has many modern first class features, it neatly compiles into a single portable executable. It's the language that's best positioned to mitigate the issues of LLMs while leveraging their (and its own) strength.

I don't disagree with your other points, but calling Rust fast at compile time is... questionable.

I've been doing Rust full time for the last half-decade and hobby before that, and its slow compile times have always been a pain point.

And I've found its slow cycle around compile-then-test is a real pain point with agentic development. Agents get into loops trying things out, and verifying their results, and they tend to accumulate a pile of tests on top of that (which require periodic cleanup). Forward progress often gets successively more slow and painful as compile times start to dominate most of what the agent is doing.

For application -- not systems dev work -- I've been considering making a move to using something like OCaml instead.

> it neatly compiles into a single portable executable.

Not quite the advantage in the AI era. Quite the contrary. Dynamic linking is something Rust will have to solve.

You are getting unfairly downvoted for speaking the truth. Well, except for the compile-time being fast.

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