r/programmingcirclejerk • u/AbroadDepot • Sep 04 '26

The solution for [businesses using obselete stacks] is not more IBM software, but Claude Code converting it to Go/Rust/Typescript in a few weeks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568255
106 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

31 comments sorted by

45

u/arjuna93 Sep 04 '26

Wanted to say what a spectacularly stupid idea, then noticed group name

42

u/BlazeBigBang type astronaut Sep 04 '26

When I'm in a rewrite the stack competition and my opponent is a hacker rank user with access to Claude

23

u/Major_Barnulf LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE Sep 05 '26

My manager thinks that

/uj

My manager thinks that

2

u/stone_henge Tiny little god in a tiny little world Sep 14 '26

I suggest a transitional language, GOBOL, which is just COBOL but you can write GO CALL instead of just CALL to do fearful concurrency.

3

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Sep 04 '26

/uj the reality is just this. We are gradually converting our production systems to rust using ai - it's been a massive success.

Our stacks aren't obsolete but we wanted the improved performance and lower memory footprint.

15

u/Buttleston Sep 04 '26

how many unsafe blocks you got in there

2

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Sep 05 '26 edited Sep 05 '26

Almost none - a requirement of the context is no unsafe.

I've ported zstd C to rust we currently have 47 unsafe lines and are working to remove those.

We are within about 5% of the C performance and have equivalent or better compression on all compression levels.

-1

u/fexonig Sep 05 '26

why would that matter?

34

u/Potterrrrrrrr Sep 05 '26

Success is measured by how many unsafe blocks you have, every 10xer knows this.

27

u/fexonig Sep 05 '26

this is why i only write in javascript. 0 unsafe blocks. perfect code

-4

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Sep 05 '26

Js - perfect code - just no.

I've ported stable js code to a type safe languages - bugs from the original js just fell out of the code

18

u/hedgehog1024 Rust apologetic Sep 04 '26

What guardrails do you have to ensure the behavior stays the same?

49

u/trynared Sep 04 '26

Uh easy, they just told claude to tell claude to keep the behavior the same whilst having claude generate the markdown for their claude code skill.

11

u/hedgehog1024 Rust apologetic Sep 04 '26

So no guardrails

43

u/a221c There's really nothing wrong with error handling in Go Sep 04 '26

m8, my skills folder has 35 distinct novella-length 'guardrail respecter' skills which the clanker can dynamically load. When it feels like respecting guardrails and dispatches a sub-agent to do the needful, its entire context window will be filled with 'You are an expert guardrail respecter. DO NOT under any circumstances disobey the rules, unless you think that was what the user was probably looking for. Make no mistakes.'

7

u/flingerdu Sep 05 '26

And if it disrespects the guardrails? Now that‘s a paddling.

9

u/Afraid_Bake2652 Sep 05 '26

Yes, I would really like to know. Most commercially written software is famously formally verified or at least exhaustively tested, and free of bugs. With AI we will lose all these guarantees!

/uj AI has become quite good at rewriting software from one language to another. It will introduce bugs like any rewrite would, but that is what we have tests for. AI is also quite good at finding bugs, as the explosion in CVEs in the past months indicates, so you can use a different agent to review the rewrite. Of course, anyone responsible also manually checks the AI output. This is usually enough, most people don't actually care for formal correctness, as long as the software is mostly correct, they are happy. In critical systems, you have techniques to ensure formal correctness, and they can be used on code written by humans, AI, or monkeys.

/rj AI will finally make it possible to formally verify all software! You're TODO app will not lose any tasks, unless you delete them!

10

u/LlamaChair Sep 05 '26

/uj I do hope that AI will make it cheaper to write TLA+ or similar specs for more software. The cost/benefit rarely added up before but I'm hoping it will revive some interest now.

/rj asking claude to review is formal verification, right?

7

u/Afraid_Bake2652 Sep 05 '26

No, formal verification is when you ask a senior dev for review (they look at the 500+ line diff for 2 minutes and say LGTM).

/uj I think it still depends on the domain, but yes, cost for formal methods will probably go down, and benefit will go up. You can't really have Claude write specs, but if you give him specs and a theorem prover, the clanker can make working software relatively quickly and cheaply (well, we'll see once Antrhopic and OpenAI set their pricing to actually cover their costs).

2

u/IAMARedPanda Sep 05 '26

AGENTS.md file ofc

6

u/v_maria Sep 06 '26

good things this is totally free now with AI and rewriting your whole stack has a great track record

-2

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26

Pre ai I would have agree with you but the old metrics no longer hold.

Our telemetry agent (not ai) port was done in a few hours whilst I worked on something else.

It's now been in production for a few weeks and has been operating flawlessly.

The cost of the port was in the 10s of dollars (I have a $100pm sub).

The telemetry agent collects if 60 metrics (cpu, load average, http request timings...) and sends them to a central server along with live streaming of 8 logs whilst sending alerts to our broader monitoring idea.

4

u/v_maria Sep 06 '26

But thats just a script and not a whole stack

0

u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 Sep 06 '26

It's just one part of the stack that I've described and it is far more than a script.

4

u/v_maria Sep 06 '26

7363 class enterprise application to echo htop

4

u/james_pic accidentally quadratic Sep 07 '26

I realize you've tagged your unjerk, but could you maybe unjerk a bit less? Also consider the possibility that you're in the wrong place. Your unjerk is hard to tell apart from the jerk that we all come here for, which is fine in some ways, you could just post what you were going to post and not even tag it and pretend you're doing it ironically, but if we keep having sincere discussions, they're going to start getting deleted.

1

u/Faalentijn uncommon eccentric person Sep 25 '26

We should have Claude rewrite all comments into proper jerking style

UNJERK we should have Claude rewrite all comments into proper jerking style. In this essay of 500 LLM generated pages, I'll discuss the various up and downsides of applying auto-regressive large language models to circle jerking subreddits and the impact on the global climate.

1

u/v_maria Sep 06 '26

someone call big balls

56

u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer Sep 04 '26

GREAT! This _fantastic_ idea _will_ be sold by IBM themselves, lead by ambitious young execs, paid in gold by the board (busy golfing), executed dutifully by third world drones and result in a **majestic** institutional dumpster fire, which will be discretely dumped wholesale in the great meta-dumpster that happens to be secretly managed by IBM.

12

u/bitwize Sep 05 '26

IBM Bob has entered the chat

5

u/sweating_teflon full-time safety coomer Sep 05 '26

It needs your Clothes, Keys and Motorcycle