alt Hacker NewsHonestly, I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake. After reading this, I'm starting to think I was wrong.
If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.
Today's AI-generated rewrites may not produce code that humans would consider high quality or maintainable. But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months. If AI is the primary consumer, maintainer, and refactorer of code, human readability becomes far less important than correctness, performance, and the ability to iterate.
This feels like a shift where software may no longer exist as a long-lived artifact in its current form. Instead of writing and maintaining applications for years, we may generate, adapt, and discard them continuously for each use case.
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That sounds like a massive waste of finite energy and compute resources.
> Honestly, I initially thought rewriting an entire codebase with AI would be a huge mistake. After reading this, I'm starting to think I was wrong.
> If projects like Bun can be substantially rewritten and shipped to millions of users, it suggests we're entering a very different phase of software development.
exactly. this wasn't a technical project. this was a marketing stunt that worked on you.
We are the ones to get to decide. Do we want that? I don’t. But im just a single data point
> But I'm beginning to wonder whether that will even matter in a few months.
At that point, even Bun itself doesn't matter. All intermediate tools don't matter if LLMs can reliably write something large.
The problem is that LLM is not quite there yet. The rewrite was only possible because they mostly stick to 1-to-1 translation resulting in non-idiomatic Rust code. So, what from there? I don't think they can really build up a sane codebase from that state. They only shot themselves with a bigger gun.