They get abandoned because they get generated on a whim.

Sunk cost fallacy can be a feature: if you have spent a lot of blood, sweat, and tears on a project, you are more likely to push it through adversity and the doldrums that inevitably one will encounter. If all it took was one of those momentarily brilliant ideas and a prompt on Claude to produce something, there is no attachment whatsoever to it.

Speaking as the ‘average programmer’, I have dozens of brilliant ideas per day that don’t stand the test of time or scrutiny, and the very few that pass the filter don’t seem that interesting days later, or worth the effort at all.

Ideas have always been cheap. Now, proof of concepts have become as cheap. I don’t care about your Show HN unless you have spent a month on it.

> Now if that's further migrated to safe Rust, put into production & gathered feedback from lots of users, yes then you have something.

Obviously they have to start somewhere if they want to get to safe rust with a considerable degree of battle testing. So they decided to start with just a transliteration and go from there.

I think the Zig people are really just concerned that maybe Zig itself is a DOA language because it doesn't offer enough over C for any serious use and their flagship project has now abandoned it.

Just search "segfault" on the Zig issue tracker and you'll see why people are starting to be skeptical of the future utility of such a language in the face of something like Rust.

Yeah, I was just commenting on a LinkedIn post[0] (don't hate the player, hate the game :) ). In it, someone talked about the difference between creating software and owning it.

Creating software with AI is super easy--plan, prompt, test, go, go, go!

Owning software means you're responsible for maintaining it over time, fixing edge cases, operating it well, and more.

If you're building a one-off custom webapp to meet your needs, create away. If you're writing software for a business to run on, you're owning it. My fav article on this topic is this post[1] on durable vs disposable software.

0: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7482123...

1: https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/disposable-code-is-here-to-sta...

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

In contrast with the Zig codebase, you now have clear well-scoped unsafe boundaries you can iteratively fix one by one. This was not the case before.

I guess the Rust rewrite is the exit path of the Bun's author so that the others could "handle" the code base.

the rust is merged into main https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

and the rust version has been live in claude code since june 17th.

I don't even get what they gain by Rust - Bun imports Webkit, which is a C++ project, relying on it for stuff like JITing Javascript. I would say that's a major concern, and making sure the JIT doesn't emit anything broken or naughty is completely outside the scope of Rust.

But it’s really the same old problem we’ve seen for decades. Developers write code. Owners declare victory. Owners rid themselves of expensive opex. Owners sell the division or try to keep the project limping along but all they see is vaguaries from the new cheap guy who they keep telling isn’t good enough for a raise, company hemorrhages money and eventually sells for a song.

They’ve just found a way to explore that logical fallacy even faster.

> Because value of a project is not in the code produced. It's in the amount of battle-testing that code has seen.

Rel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I think the mistake people are making currently is that they publicize stuff way too early. I.e. they make a prototype and then put that out there. Possibly with a full product page and all.

People did this also before LLM, but the difference is that now the prototype is a fully functional product in the technical sense whereas before it was little more than a glorified Hello World. The human effort and calendar time used remains roughly the same.

There's gonna be amazing products made with LLM, but it'll take some time. Not as long as it did before, but still significant time.

I don't think Zig community is triggered, I think only Zig's creator is triggered because he is afraid of people interpreting this as "Zig is unsuitable for X".

I think a lot of people will, but those who do probably weren't the target audience for Zig in the first place?

> How is that better than the Zig codebase you started with?

It's not better, it's worse given the average bear's assumption about a rust project.

That's such a bad take. You mention some good things they need to do but ignore the part that those are next steps and will take time.

You are acting like they need to complete everything at once...why?

Bun (rust) is not even released as stable yet and getting extensive usage on Claude code. They are making improvements and fixes. So what's the issue here?

Totally disagree that the value of a project is it's durability. The value of the project is almost entirely disconnected from durability. Value is simply the ability to solve a problem for you. I'll use a bad screwdriver before I use my fingers, even if I prefer good screwdrivers.

Claude Code was a vibe coded experiment, a "what if", that basically consumed software engineering in six months flat. Not because it's durable (it's not), but because the value it provided was so overwhelming.

People will use bad software if the value it provides is high. People will avoid the most durable and battle-tested software ever written if it doesn't actually provide value (solve a problem for them).