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Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’ (www.theregister.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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*The Rustification of Bun#

Rewriting 500,000 lines of Zig into another language would be a gargantuan undertaking if done by hand. “A rewrite in another language would take a small team of engineers a full year. It would mean freezing bugfixes, security fixes or feature development for that time,” Sumner wrote.

Instead, Sumner went with Claude. He spun up about 50 dynamic Claude Code workflows, reaching a peak of about 1,300 lines of code per minute and generating over a million lines of Rust code. The job took 11 days and cost about $165,000 at API pricing. Claude Fable did most of the heavy lifting.

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[–] [S] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

More like 500 lines per person-year.

You can do the math yourself:

  • how many lines of code does the linux kernel have?

  • what is the estimated value of the kernel, which is the hypothetical cost to re-create it?

  • what do you think the seniority of a linux kernel developer is?

  • what annual salary do they make in the country which uses Linux most - the US?

  • now divide kernel value by annual salary to get man-years, and lines of code by man-years to get average lines of code per year

Result: Typing in code that somehow compiles was never the bottleneck

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