Our full conversation with Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, is out now. No AI policy, leaving GitHub, a $670K nonprofit, and why there's no 1.0 (yet).

I've got an agent in a loop optimizing a renderer with the goal to minimize frame times (and tests to measure). It got times down from 88ms to 2ms and allocations down from ~150K to 500. Sounds good, right? Wrong. This is exactly why agent psychosis is a big fucking problem. As an experiment, I rewrote the Ghostty core render state in Go, with access to identically laid out data structures as Ghostty and the exact same validation tests. I made a purposely naive renderer (simple, correct, but slow). 88ms per frame with 150,000 allocations (horrendous, lol)! I then kickstarted a Ralph loop to bring the frame times down. I told it it can't modify input data structures or the public API or tests (they're correct), but it can do anything else it wants. It got to work. It has worked for about 4 hours. I've spent around $350 on this experiment so far. The results? 88ms => 1.5ms 150K allocs => ~500 allocs Incredible right? Nope. My hand-written renderer I ported has frame times (same benchmark) of ~20us (0.020ms) and 0 allocations in the update path. This is the problem with psychosis and lacking systems understanding. If you don't understand the system, you're going to accept that this is an incredible result. If you understand the system, you'll see better solutions immediately and can do roughly 75x better on throughput. The people who blindly trust agent output are in the former camp. They're sheeple, overdrinking from a fountain of mediocrity. Standard disclaimer: I use AI all the time. I like AI. The point I'm making is to not blindly accept results. Think. Analyze. Learn.

Our full conversation with Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, is out now. No AI policy, leaving GitHub, a $670K nonprofit, and why there's no 1.0 (yet).

We’ve had on the order of 3 memory bugs in 6 years of TigerBeetle. None RCEs. On the other hand, our own simulators have proactively found hundreds of (devastatingly catastrophic) distributed systems correctness bugs per year. Given how hard TigerBeetle’s domain is, in terms of mission critical financial transaction processing, I’ve never for one minute believed that writing TB in a memory safe language such as say TypeScript would somehow magically (!) make any material impact compared to the 100x correctness multiplier of TigerStyle. That’s because—rather than fall for the fallacy of composition, i.e. to see distributed correctness as a language problem—TigerStyle instead takes ultimate responsibility for the “end to end” correctness of the distributed system as a whole. Per systems engineering, correctness is always a systems design problem. For example, how to build a reliable whole, (especially) out of unreliable parts, such as broken firmware, bitrot, programmer error etc. In other words, application of the end to end principle. But when you TigerStyle the design in this way, the world of systems engineering also completely opens up to you and changes how you evaluate systems languages (now things like “power to grammar ratio”, or explicitness, checked arithmetic and precision become more critical and valuable to you). Of course, it is harder to care about correctness, to take responsibility for correctness end to end. Yes, you’re forced to begin to worry about the more serious concerns, starting with the basics of static allocation, explicit limits, assertions, deterministic simulation testing and moving to more advanced topics like protocol-awareness and storage fault-tolerance. But then again, TigerStyle is such a force multiplier, that you achieve mission critical quality, and in less time and with greater velocity. If you’re tired of production issues, and if you want to “engineer your engineering”, I would encourage you to lift up your thinking to the level of systems design and end to end correctness. Start thinking about your methodology and begin embracing TigerStyle. tigerstyle.dev

Bun rewrote itself from Zig to Rust. AI did most of the work. 98% of the test suite passed on the first run. The question isn't hypothetical anymore. Should we rewrite Node.js in Rust?

You would need Zig to be acquired by Anthropic. The things Bun they did in their codebase are also possible, becuse Bun is owned by Anthropic and they could go programmatically into files. You don’t believe it, but @theo made video about it