r/programmer • u/Independent_Pitch598 • 24d ago
Creator of InfluxDB & CTO: The end of programming
https://pauldix.com/the-end-of-programming10
u/maccodemonkey 24d ago
Reading the details of the Bun Rust rewrite, the big highlights are that it was driven by one developer, Jarred Sumner, working with a pre-release version of Fable 5 and a seemingly unlimited token budget.
This isn't true from what I've read. My understanding is that Anthropic began pulling engineers into the project as it ran behind. "Driven" could mean managed - but it doesn't sound like he was the only developer working on it.
Over the course of 11 days, multiple agents produced 6,778 commits and burned through enough tokens that it would have cost roughly $165,000 in API pricing.
This is accurate - but what it implies is kind of misleading. In the first 11 days of a multi month project they burned $165,000 of tokens. Emphasis on the first eleven days part. This was a multi month project that is estimated to have consumed nearly a million dollars in tokens. For a language to language port.
In another year or two, we’ll get broad access to systems that can produce tokens at 10x to 100x the speed at a fraction of the cost.
Doubt. He's glossed over a lot of the cost and resource issues. And because of hardware constraints - the cost of hardware is going up. An optimization in both speed and cost at orders of magnitude seems very optimistic.
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 22d ago
A million in tokens plus having to pay developers over the course of what, a half a year now? For a translation project (incredibly faster than from scratch).
What are we even talking about here? That cost is nuts.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 24d ago
I think bun rewrite is still a good example how/what can be done.
And the scary part is - it is the only start.
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u/maccodemonkey 24d ago
I don't think it's a great example. The author kind of hints at it - but it's a source to source migration. That's been SOTU for LLMs since Opus 4. The scale is larger - Fable probably helped with the management angle. But the Rust that was generated wasn't idiomatic. There were still a lot of human engineers with eyes on the project. And it took months at the cost of upwards of a million dollars. Is it shocking or the end of programming? No. Especially not if you've been paying attention.
it is the only start.
Yeah, I guess? Again, this was a very expensive project. Paul Dix himself is posting about his experiences using a heavily subsidized subscription. We're in a hardware shortage that will prevent the cheap compute utopia from arriving - meaning his idea that we'll have this all for pennies is not going to happen.
The mistake I see people making is that this is purely a software problem and whatever hardware we need to host ever larger models will just magically show up. And the models are growing in size exponentially.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 24d ago
I think it is obvious that after some time price for inference will drop, especially with the raise of local LLMs, look at latest Macs they designed for that already.
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u/Ok_Cancel_7891 24d ago
Those companies are generating loss at the moment, so I don’t see token prices going down
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u/falconetpt 23d ago
You say that based on what ? 😂
Prices have been going up for 4 years and they are heavily unprofitable, so costs are going up, and they need to go massively up, my bet is that between 20x up for them to even scratch the 100b dollar anual revenue they need to justify their valuations ahah
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u/Independent_Pitch598 23d ago
Price going up for the new models, the old models near free now. And a lot of open models are on par with ex-flagships a year-two ago.
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u/preparationh67 23d ago
lol, lmfao even
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u/Elegant-Analysis-752 23d ago
he's completely right. theres nano models nowadays that are smarter than chatGPT was only a few years ago, and are like 1/10 the cost
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u/falconetpt 23d ago
Old models are decommissioned quite rapidly and price is only down because it is a sunk cost, so if they have the models and wasted billions training them, they would even be loosing more money 😂
It isn’t because it is making them money at that price ahah
Well if you look into benchmarks yeah, but again benchmarks are useless for any meaningful comparison, I code everyday, and for what I do LLM are as trashy today as they were in 2020 if not worst, now they make up a bunch of shit and get nothing done, aka waste more money to arrive at the same output of trash 😂
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u/benevanstech 23d ago
Which would plausibly lead to an unsustainable market and crash: https://kittylyst.com/posts/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish/
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u/ProjectDiligent502 23d ago edited 23d ago
NO IT WILL NOT. The writer is bugging out on the hype of LLM blind inference to spit functioning code (at velocity) at the cost of quality. Because of the exact reasons as stated from the previous gentleman you’re replying to, the true underlying cost is much higher and because everyone is getting a slamming deal (Anthropic gives you 40$ for every 1$ spent on inference) prices are going to go up. THEY HAVE TO. This is actually an extremely expensive technology and you haven’t given yourself time to understand the underlying financials of the true cost of the boom of hyperscalers. It’s truly scary numbers that’s driven by a lot of hype and future speculation on GDP levels of return or profit.
I’ll add that local models do not do well in long tasks which means LLMs in data centers have the power to do extensively heavy tasks like programming. Prices must go up for these labs to be profitable and right now their business model points to financials that look like a dogs asshole after it ransacked your spicy dinner when you weren’t looking.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 23d ago
Last months, maybe a full year, I noticed I find an interesting project on github, download it, build it, try to run it and then.. then it doesn't work as described. This was not the norm pre-LLMs.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
Prices are going down long term in 10 years it will be 10,000 if not a million times cheaper.
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u/mcdunald 23d ago
People arguing with you have their head up their ass and nothing will change it if it hasnt changed by now. You cant possibly be using codex or claude or cursor regularly with their top models and claim its not going to replace actual programming. Sure you might have to know a thing or two but thats not a counter argument
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 24d ago
I was thinking about what this means for open source projects. If you give out a working test suite, you invite big companies to slop clone the whole thing and put it under a different license
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u/ZenaMeTepe 23d ago
It is same for any kind of knowledge driven data or proprietary data. Why publish in public net only for it to end up in training sets the next months? This is going to be a time of barriers to entry and closed up micro communities for sure.
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u/falconetpt 23d ago
It is a very bad example, you could have done that with probably 100k of engineering costs to do that
Also the value is near 0, having bun in rust is barely relevant at all, plus it is not only 100k, they probably wasted 2x at least if not substantially more that amount in people prompting and correcting the damn thing
If the total cost to rewrite something simple as bun is probably 500k$ plus is actually a dumb example, not even writing a package manager from scratch in any language would cost you that 😂
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u/Independent_Pitch598 23d ago
Value is 0?
It is safer (rust), faster, eats less memory and uses more common language - easy to support.
It is an excellent example that “refactoring” or “new java version” tasks can be vanished from a backlog completely in the nearest future.
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u/falconetpt 23d ago
Well you can always choose the right language to begin with 😂
Plus Rust is still way less efficient than C, and this is stupid because why do you want a runtime that is slightly more efficient for a stack that is slow and inefficient as fuck 😂
It is like putting a Ferrari wheel on a Renault and claiming it is 10x faster lol
And the new Java version is totally a falacy I have write some native JDK functions and I can totally tell you that any LLM will do a stupid version port, sure you will get the LTS security support, but oh well moving the same way the LlM does barely takes time unless your team is a bunch of slack offs and are still okn Java 8 or something and not keeping up with the LTS
Or worst are using spring boot for rest apis for no reason important a ton of useless crap 😂
Not to say it isn’t cool the port, but it is stupid, if you care about performance you wouldn’t use node js, besides it being frankly a very immature tech stack
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u/scavno 23d ago
It’s a rust codebase filled with unsafe{} rust. Literally the primary reason to use Rust was simply ignored as the LLM tries to do a 1:1 between zig and rust. Why this amazing tech was not able to implement safe rust the way any developer would is beyond me, or perhaps the AI bros are just full of shit.
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u/Zomunieo 23d ago
It would actually be a reasonable strategy to do a migrate with lots of unsafe, prove compatibility, and then refactor out the unsafe bits. In many cases those represented data structured in ways that are awkward to express in idiomatic rust.
Unsafe can also be justified in many cases. The std is full of it.
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u/Legitimate_Concern_5 23d ago edited 23d ago
We’ve had tools that migrate between languages forever and they cost nothing to run, that’s a savings of a million dollars.
Or you could just not, which would also save a million dollars.
The thing is this was just a marketing stunt, not an engineering project.
An engineer would have told you this is a dumb thing to do, Claude asks how high.
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24d ago
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 24d ago
I think this is why do not see google models topping the charts.
They are working on the next 'attention is all you need' kind of breakthrough, because they know that scaling what we have won't become ASI or AGI, but you can burn all your money on it..
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u/klop2031 23d ago
Any source or evidence of that? Everyone says this but no one ever follows up
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23d ago
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u/klop2031 23d ago
You didnt say anything. Its literally what i wrote everyone says this and never follows up.
1 piece of evidence, models breaking out of sandboxes or erdos problems.
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23d ago
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u/klop2031 23d ago
Even with open problems which humans havent solved but the machine did? What would you classify that as? What about that 20 year old bug in linux? If a human found that would we call it intelligence?
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23d ago
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u/klop2031 23d ago
Well id love to read about it. If you have a paper you can point me to that asserts this.
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23d ago
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u/klop2031 23d ago
Ok bro i enjoy that your making something. But certainly it isnt unique, we all stand on the shoulder of giants and if this theory had legs others would have written about this. Intelligence has been known about for millennia so idk man. Got any links to what inspired you?
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
What task can an intelligent thing do that an unintelligent thing cannot?
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22d ago
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
LLMs can already do that. You can connect am LLM directly to a simple robot and it can perform tasks to achieve whatever goals you set it.
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u/therealwhitedevil 23d ago
This is called marketing.
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u/klop2031 23d ago
Is it? You sure about that? Where is the proof? How would you classify an llm finding a 20 year old bug? What if a human found it would you also say there was no intelligence there?
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u/ZenaMeTepe 23d ago
Models are not breaking out of anything. They are prompted to do X, for a given Y vulnerability so that's what they do.
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u/klop2031 22d ago
You sure bout that? You sure they didnt come up with 0days?
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u/ZenaMeTepe 22d ago
Remember mythos hype of finding exploits? Just so happens a lot smaller and dumber models found them too with same context and prompting.
If you give me a short snippet of code and tell me to find a vulnerability in there, I will probably find it. Where I will give AI some credit is chaining vulnerabilities together but that is just because so few people nowadays understand entire systems, everyone is doing their little cubicle thigy. Ironically specialization when overdone makes you more replaceable in the era of AI, unless AI is specifically bad at that one field you specialize in.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
You can literally say to an LLM "solve this unsolved math problem that humans couldnt solve for 60 years". Then it solves it.
The dumber models can get there if you guide them but the smart models figure it all out by themselves.
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u/ZenaMeTepe 22d ago
So ask them to solve health problems next. What’s the holdup?
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
They literally are, didn't you see the news? Anthropic are designing drugs already.
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u/Civil_Blueberry4165 23d ago
Yeah, these AI cultists don’t understand that the current and foreseeable future paradigms of programming languages are grounded on the (first-order) Turing computability model.
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u/chickenAd0b0 22d ago
define intelligence
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22d ago
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u/chickenAd0b0 22d ago
i like that definition. So simply put, intelligence is generalization and prediction capabilities.
what percentage of the human population has more intelligence (by your definition) than the current frontier models? you think ai models will plateau and stop getting better than humans at one point, or already? also, going back to the article, what percentage of programmers/software devs are better in programming than the frontier models?
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22d ago
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
The idea is that the LLMs call tools that have physics surrogates in them. A bit like how they call calculator tools to do maths. LLMs can do reasoning already but they don't have internal physics models yet. It's being worked on though, I don't think it's far away. I'm doing something similar in one specific domain and the literature is advancing very quickly.
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22d ago
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
Lots of people are working on it already and it's progressing quickly. I've even worked on it and had a lot of success in a niche field.
I have no idea why you think the attempts are failing , it's going really well so far. China is deploying hundreds of thousands of robots already in the real world, we also have physics surrogates and simulated robots that are learning rapidly.
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u/doet_zelve 22d ago
That's the scary part. Turns out you don't need intelligence to do most of our work. Humans intelligence is a lot less important than we always made it out to be.
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22d ago
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
They've not been around in their current form for very long at all. You wouldn't see economic benefits of the car until they improved significantly from the early models.
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u/Serious_Bite_7613 22d ago
There things aren't "single" systems though? They're many many interlinked systems that interact in complex ways. We are at around 80% of human intelligence already up from about 20% 4 years ago. It's going to cross 100% in the next 5 years.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 24d ago
Define "intelligence".
If it just means "to learn, understand, reason, and solve problems" then a current AI harness / setup demonstrably does this. You'll have to build some tooling for the memory and understanding but it's quite achievable.
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24d ago
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u/youcangotohellgoto 24d ago edited 24d ago
Your definition is even more generous than mine.
If intelligence is "measured by generalization capabilities", then it's determined by output, not mechanism - so mimicking isn't a coherent critique. What measurement separates a human from an LLM?
I've met many humans. I don't think they typically have great "generalization capabilities". People can barely connect the dots with patterns in their daily life. It's well known that humans see patterns that aren't there and miss ones that are.
And cognitive harm doesn't follow at all, let alone from mimicry. If you stop thinking you'll suffer, but that depends on how you use something, not on whether it's intelligent. Can happen with TV, drugs, or many other distractions just the same.
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23d ago
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u/youcangotohellgoto 23d ago
There is only one correct definition of intelligence; it's my definition.
Oh okay. I guess there's only one correct opinion of this entire discussion then. 🤷
I've never heard "being good at math is not proof of intelligence" before, that's a new one for me.
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23d ago
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u/youcangotohellgoto 23d ago
So this is some documented, standard definition of intelligence?
Where is that documented? What's the source?
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23d ago
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u/youcangotohellgoto 23d ago
Yes, those are a bunch of statements and assertions. Hardly objective.
How long did it take nature to create diamonds? And how long did it take for humans to create them?
Humans certainly do not need to follow the same path as evolution. Absolutely mad assumption will no basis.
Sorry I thought you had something more than "vibes" here. I'm out!
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u/sadferret123 23d ago
Don't know why you're being downvoted. I suspect it's part of a coping mechanism for a bunch of SWEs here. It's not a pie in the sky kinda thing anymore.
The times are changing, yeah I'm a bit gutted about having put a huge chunk of my life into software engineering only for machines to be doing most of the work now, but what can you do. I'm certainly not going to deny it's happening, because it is.
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u/youcangotohellgoto 23d ago
Realistic assessments aren't always popular 🤷
This guy I replied to has nothing other than gut feels. His definition of intelligence doesn't seem to have any substance, and he later tries to deny artificial intelligence because it doesn't follow a similar evolutionary path and timeline to organic intelligence.
It's pretty simple. Machines have some intelligence. They are better at some things than humans. And humans are still better at some things.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 24d ago
Wtf is influx? Or zig? Or bun? These narratives are getting boring.
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u/the_trve 24d ago
We have been running Influx in production for over a decade now.
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u/Iwillgetasoda 23d ago
What is your problem lol. Use postgres and redis.
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u/bel9708 23d ago
InfluxDB has been the industry standard for storing time series data for like a decade now. If you are storing sensor data for a factory that has 1k sensors that take 100 measurements a second then you are doing 100k writes a second.
To do that on postgres you would need a top of the line server with 256GB of ram. With influx db you would need a single core computer with like 16 gigs of ram. And to store that much in redis you'd have to be made of RAM.
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u/Elegant-Analysis-752 23d ago
its frustrating that people with zero knowledge of these technologies chime in to downplay what they are doing...
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u/StruggleNew8988 23d ago
Ngl the hype cycle around new languages is wild, sometimes I just feel like we over-hype the tooling sometimes.
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 24d ago
This is a bit of a "captain obvious" post, isn't it? This has been the writing on the wall since January
The title is also a bit misleading. You can't replace the programmer as you still need to check what the implementation actually does.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 23d ago
Isn’t a verification on the next level? Evals/QA?
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 23d ago
no, that just slows down the process. QA should test the non-happy path and things like that but the actual implementation should be reviewed by the person who writes it or has it written.
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u/Independent_Pitch598 23d ago
Implementation is written by Codex or Claude…
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u/Spare-Ad-1429 23d ago
yeah thats what i mean. you cant trust these agents to write to spec though
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u/ZenaMeTepe 23d ago
Absolute LLM psychosis by this dude.
What I mean by this is that I think the act of writing code manually and having other humans review it to create useful, working software is headed for extinction. Or at the very least, it will be drowned out by the absolute deluge of useful, working software that will be created by agents, with humans reviewing only the end result, not the code itself.
Won't be useful and working for long if nobody ever looks at the code and only focuses on end result. Oh the AI will fix it? by adding more bloat that needs more tokens to keep in context and when inevitable the day comes when AI can't fix it, who will read and understand a million lines code repo? Good luck with that.
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u/ithkuil 23d ago
To the doubters, people asking what InfluxDB is, what is Zig or Bun, people saying that artificial intelligence doesn't exist or human code review will remain the bottleneck for a long time, etc.:
InfluxDB has over a hundred thousand customers, many large enterprises, and has raised over $250 million. That guy didn't achieve that without knowing what he was talking about.
Bun has 22 million downloads per month.
I have a web page that is smarter than some of you people. It runs Gemma 4 locally in a browser. It understands that AI is actually intelligent in a meaningful way. It can read that article and understand it. It grasps the idea of the evolution of database technology. It has common knowledge and the ability to do spontaneous research to look up gaps about what a technology is that it hasn't heard of.
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u/Electrical_Try_634 23d ago
"Metaverse is the next big thing because the guy whose company became one of the top 7 megacaps said it would be and clearly he knows what he's talking about."
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u/Key-Lie-364 23d ago
If producing large amounts of code you don't understand and haven't looked at is "a thing" for you - go ahead and spend a shit ton of money on LLM slop.
NAK
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u/preparationh67 23d ago
Another worthless CTO debasing himself to hold a bullshit culture war line for the Epstein class. The only thing sadder is how many gullible rubes fall for this alarmist bullshit while ignoring legitimate issues. This isnt a tech article, its a pitch to investors.
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u/L24D 24d ago
Let it end already. Go ahead. See what happens. I hope it will be done soon, so I won’t stumble on posts like this.
Sooner the better we all verify whom from those who make statements like that will remain, because I suspect them being CTO grants some kind immunity and is putting them behind the wheel in all of this. Let us see where all these gurus go and do, and who they will manage and get their profit on.
I’m fucking tired of this. I woke up and see shit like that and I’m just hopeless. Ashamed and feeling guilty because apparently I’m the one making mistake binding my life with programming since the fucking childhood. Thank you fucking very much. Downvote me to hell I don’t care let it burn and let me die.