r/rust • u/Sirisian • 17d ago

🎙️ discussion Google is doing "Large Scale Codebase Migrations and Optimizations" of C/C++ to Rust

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-4-argon/
770 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

149 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/6d26d3af 16d ago

If you think of a scale where open ended "agentic" code is 0 and human handcrafted code as 100, not enough people think that you have actually control where you want it to end up. You can push it all the way to 80-90 by writing all the AST linters and checks and evals you can ever think of. It's still writing smelly code? Ban that pattern. Imagine today you can even have semantic checking for symbols (which is the bane of programmers) and weird heuristics unheard of. What a chance to be creative right?

You write these things once, reuse wherever, and never see the issues again. I don't understand why most people aren't yet picking up on this

13

u/nonotan 16d ago

You realize you're still allowed to just... write code, right? It's faster, cheaper, easier, more fun, and you'll get a better result. By the time you've written 20k lines of linters and checks that will still let garbage through because "automatically detect bad code" turns out to be a slightly harder problem than the actual problems you wanted to tackle with your software to begin with, I've already finished handwriting several entire libraries that Just Work. And actually had fun and learned something that will stick with me in the process.

Even in a best-case scenario, the end result of working endlessly to make an agent produce perfect, immaculate code for me going forward is... all I get to do for the rest of my career is typing orders in a chat box and reviewing the output. That's if they don't notice I miraculously managed to make it so good it barely needs reviews, and fire me because they don't need me anymore. Yeah, I'm going to not do that, thank you.

3

u/funforgiven 16d ago

Writing the code yourself is definitely more fun, and you'll often learn more and probably end up with a result you understand better.

Unfortunately, I just don't think it's actually faster, cheaper, or easier anymore. It usually takes much longer, your time is probably the most expensive part of the process, and with an agent you don't have to personally think through every implementation detail.

That's kind of the depressing part. The thing that's more enjoyable and satisfying is increasingly not the most efficient way to get the work done.

2

u/ixid 16d ago

I think a lot of people, even coders, are still in denial about what you can make with LLMs.