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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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[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

you can't compare the tech debt because it's essentially a line by line translation from an existing codebase, not 1M brand new lines of code

[-] ReptilianCleric@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago

That's...irrelevant.

Really. The specific details of the task doesn't change that this was automated. Until it's reviewed, it's basically a pile of Schrödinger's bugs and security holes. That's the technical debt.

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It really isn't. A line by line translation doesn't introduce new logic and doesn't change the system architecture. Saying it carries the same tech debt as brand new code is just not true.

[-] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Assuming the llm did it line by line without changing anything during an arbitrary hallucination.

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

and that's a different problem entirely

this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
211 points (97.7% liked)

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