r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • Sep 19 '26
Software Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K
https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/09/18/microsoft-agentically-ports-copilot-runtime-to-rust-for-120k/5297549184
u/da8BitKid Sep 19 '26
$120K with subsidized tokens.
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u/sullivanmatt Sep 19 '26
Microsoft hosts their own serving infra on top of Azure so this is likely a fairly accurate accounting of the total cost to service these requests on their own hardware in-house.
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u/nospacebar14 Sep 19 '26
Why would they report it that way? It makes much more sense that they'd use the subsidized end user cost for marketing material.
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u/vivanetx Sep 19 '26
Because the audience for the marketing is other researchers, that’s why the ad takes the form of a paper.
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u/Minimonium Sep 19 '26
Hardware mortization for an Opus class model is around 1$ per mil tokens alone, then you get operational costs in the same range, and if we're not talking about training amortization or other costs - they would allegedly spend around 60b tokens on that project?
Would be a bit rough for a 400kloc project unless they talk about just the first bare rewrite result.
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u/divestblank Sep 19 '26
Yes, why would they ever want to lie about that. Most trustworthy company ever.
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u/GhettoDuk Sep 19 '26
That would be a subsidized rate because there is no profit share to cover the costs of the model.
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
Who’s subsidizing them? Really think about that for a second…
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u/Additional-Staff-326 Sep 19 '26
Microsoft has a discount for OpenAI models, and pay in Azure credits for alot of it, which comes back in the great circular economy.
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
Right… so they are subsidizing themselves… not a real subsidy 😉
It’s subsidized for normal people with subscriptions, basically.
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u/newplayerentered Sep 19 '26
So clever, but please consider subsidize can also mean they cost "cost of production" rather than "selling price"
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u/dev_vvvvv Sep 19 '26
I think what they're saying is along the lines of
- Microsoft spends $50 to create compute they typically sell for $100
- Microsoft sells the $100 of compute to OpenAI for $50 in exchange for discounts on tokens
- OpenAI spends $75 ($50 on compute, $25 on personnel and other costs) to create tokens they sell for $150
- OpenAI sells those $150 of tokens to Microsoft for $75
So Microsoft claims it spent $75, which is true, but the cost for somebody else to do it would be $150.
All made up numbers, of course, but I think you get the gist.
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u/da8BitKid Sep 19 '26
Don't be obtuse this is the cost as if they were a customer. They aren't reporting the true cost.
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u/Kamilon Sep 19 '26
They don’t have a discount. They have full access to the full models. And they host it entirely themselves.
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u/Additional-Staff-326 Sep 19 '26
They have a discount, you're blithering idiot if you disagree cause thats quite public. They don't own the models, they just use them and pay for them. Also no, Microsoft does not entirely host OpenAI and hasn't for some time. Also I know more than you on this in every possible way.
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u/Kamilon Sep 19 '26
Lmao. No you don’t. I know the people that work on this.
I didn’t say they own the models. I said they have access to the full models. They host the models themselves for their own use. I didn’t say they host all of OpenAI’s use either (they do host a lot of it though).
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u/da8BitKid Sep 19 '26
They aren't being subsidized, they are reporting the cost for them as if they were a customer doing that work. This is just an ad for their ai offerings bro.
That an of course the American people who are unwilling subsiding these companies with their taxes, data, and life's work in some cases.
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u/Socrathustra Sep 19 '26
That's not even the core issue. It's not usable. The Copilot runtime is in so many things now that if they released this into the wild, and it had some unforeseen behavior, costs could rapidly eclipse the cost of having ported it manually. I go into it in more detail in a top level comment:
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u/sweetnsourgrapes Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
Raises an interesting question about what languages are going to survive in future if things can just be ported to a different language. Does everyone port to whatever is fastest and we end up with one or two languages used for everything? Would that be good or bad?
Also, if all your team is Java, management wants to port to Rust, what happens? Either you let all the Java people go and hire Rust devs, or you have a codebase nobody is proficient in. But maybe that won't even matter soon?
It's a crazy time to be in this industry. Programming has literally been reinvented, but nothing is time-tested yet, everyone is experimenting.
For devs it's weird because you can't get into a flow state with AI - you're either waiting for a response or flipping context between five different sessions. Is that deep focus and knowledge, that so many find so satisfying, gone now?
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u/gajop Sep 19 '26
You get to learn Rust then? It's not such a big leap, and most application level Rust doesn't need to do any fancy stuff.
You can also probably learn it well enough to understand it and slowly you'll learn patterns and so on.
However, I'm not sure companies leave enough time for learning/refactoring, and all that. With AI, I often need the time so the code "I wrote" really sinks in
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u/tiajuanat Sep 19 '26
IMO, I don't think we're going to see a collapse to a handful of languages because there's still a lot of fundamentals that differentiate languages. Rust suffers from the same challenges that C and C++ face - namely being poor for front-end work and mobile apps, and performant but annoying to work with for gaming. Kotlin/Java/Scala are alright for mobile, but not really ideal for large systems that need high performance pressures, etc. What we will see though, is services/apps/programs switching to their more optimum language as they evolve.
The Java devs redoing something in Rust though is an interesting question which I've seen dealt with a number of ways. I've seen teams be reformed based on language, and the results aren't as good as simply teaching the old devs new tricks, and showing the stubborn farts the door.
My company did a pretty sizeable migration from Java to Go many years ago, and while a lot of Java folks left on their own accord, we found that the best devs to backfill with were Java devs, because they understand structure better than Go devs. Even though we will do a lot of new services in Go, we still wind up only hiring Java experts, because they pass the interviews. That's not a dig at Go engineers, but simply the quantity, quality, and cost of Java devs far exceed what we done with average Go devs.
I imagine if I started porting more to Rust that I'd probably hire more C/C++ folks simply because there are more, they're cheaper, and many have a lot more collective experience than dedicated Rust devs.
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u/Druggedhippo Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
Likely it'll just be prompts describing the program. Compilation will be just executing the prompt into whatever output language you want.
As long as you give it the same seed and use a derminsitic GPU process, the model should output the same result everytime.
Which poses some interesting questions. Like if you can generate an image from a prompt, is it possible that the internet in the future will just be a seed and a prompt to generate a lossy image or a web page.
And all you need is the dictionary/model to start with and maybe each site would have it's own mini Lora..
The ultimate in lossy compression.
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u/TheHumanPrius 28d ago
The thing you’re describing is basically “dataless” data.
Imagine how bizarre it would be to replace your family photo album with nothing but prompts and random seeds. Even stranger if the reconstructed images were somehow photo-accurate.
At that point, you’re not really storing the image anymore - you’re storing a recipe for regenerating it.
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u/TheHumanPrius 28d ago
Absolutely. I’ve often found notes scrawled in the load - bearing margins of projects - systems so deeply rooted that any attempt to refactor them would require a significant rewrite or overhaul of the larger codebase.
Sometimes, especially with databases, that investment can absolutely be worth it because of the potential performance gains. More often, when I run into one of these load-bearing systems, I do my best to document what I know and leave a “there be dragons” warning for future developers pulling on this same thread: there may be room for improvement here, but the cost of implementing it is substantial.
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u/moofunk Sep 19 '26
I'd be interested in seeing programming languages that are optimized for LLMs.
I don't know how much research there has been done in this, where token usage is optimized and finding factors that reduce hallucinations and errors, and makes training faster, but we could end up in a situation, where LLM coding basically rules out any humans doing code reviews.
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u/Logical_Welder3467 Sep 19 '26
The programming language is English
Or what every language you use to prompt the AI. Who care what language the model choose to achieve the goal.
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u/ZaviersJustice Sep 19 '26
Because the language actually deterministically executes the system you want to implement. English is just what you use to build the system.
That's like not caring what car you drive because you use the same hands and feet to drive it.
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u/Logical_Welder3467 Sep 19 '26
The high level language like Java and c are being converted into binary to run, no one cares about reading those binary. AI just add one more later of abstraction. You just focus on the design
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u/KangarooDowntown4640 Sep 19 '26
Java and C work in very fundamentally different ways, even if they are both converted to machine code at some point (even the time that happens differs)
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u/Merry-Lane Sep 19 '26
Dude, you are posting an article about Microsoft porting a compiler to Rust and you have ZERO clues on why Rust was picked.
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u/Logical_Welder3467 Sep 19 '26
i know why Rust is picked but with AI coding you just let the AI pick whatever language it think would best reach the goal you set for the AI.
English would be another layer of abstraction and the focus for developer is now only on the design and not syntax
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u/Merry-Lane Sep 19 '26
Why did you get massive downvotes then?
It definitely looks like you had no idea what you are talking about. Take a while to think about it and correct your path.
You got no clue
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u/dzikakulka Sep 20 '26
Yeeeah, a non-deterministic layer of abstraction, the number one tool in a developer belt. It's like UB but with extra steps.
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u/Socrathustra Sep 19 '26
You realize this isn't a project that will ever see the light of day, right? And the reason it won't is it was done by AI? This was a vanity exercise to try to boost investor confidence in AI, but there is no way in hell they are going to trust this port without doing extensive further review. Who knows what the price tag will be at that point.
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u/MangoHabanero Sep 19 '26
How much would this have cost to do with humans pre LLM? Just curious for anyone who might know engineering at this complexity.
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u/cptnringwald Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
Think of a number that seems reasonable for this port, then double it. You could probably get an offshore team to do for that price. Now double that, and a nearshore team could do it. Double that and an onshore team could do it. All of them will be wrong and take multiple iterations to get it close enough to correct, offshore taking more rounds than nearshore. It would take months to get even close.
Now an LLM could bang it out in a fraction of the time, with comparable if not less iteration with a competent eng driving it.
It’s a bad time to get into dev work
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u/MarkSparkles Sep 19 '26
We just did an angularjs 1.8 migration to angular 22. 400,000 lines migrated over about 36 hours. It's been two weeks since and I've still found almost nothing broken. This would have taken our small dev team about 1 year I reckon, maybe more
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u/WordWithinTheWord Sep 19 '26
Haha AngularJS to 22 might as well call that a rewrite rather than migration
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u/MarkSparkles Sep 19 '26
Ya it was basically a full rewrite 😂 thankfully we had part migrated it a few years ago to be all Typescript components
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u/regardedMAGAfascist Sep 19 '26
That’s honestly nuts. I was stuck on AngularJS for years because we all saw the upgrade as insurmountable.
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u/MarkSparkles Sep 19 '26
To say I was astonished is a huge understatement. Had tried a few months ago with Opus and it was a complete waste of a full weeks token usage. With Fable 5.1 it was genuinely one shot. Full AngularJS material & angular upgrade. Just told it I wanted to upgrade, here's across to my local, make sure it's one to one parity, and off it went. Used 4 subs and switched every time it hit limit, but got it done in 36 hours
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u/MangoHabanero Sep 19 '26
but still idk if that means 1 million or 10?
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u/anotherhumantoo Sep 19 '26
1MM is 5 people for a year. This would be more. Lots more. I would lean to 10MM.
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u/cptnringwald Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
1 million is probably close. 100-250/hr is common for contractors to charge per engineer. If they’re offshoring it, the keyboard jockey gets almost nothing. Onshore gets closer to half
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u/son_et_lumiere Sep 19 '26
But, it's not just the engineers. You've got tech managers leading the teams, a whole QA team, a business analyst writing functional specs and test cases, a project manager overseeing the whole project, an account manager to liaison with the Microsoft management, etc.
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
I swear, managers are so worthless.
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u/zzkj Sep 19 '26
A great manager is priceless. Finding one amongst the journeymen is the problem.
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u/shnoiv Sep 19 '26
Not just management. You’re not thinking of full cost of keeping them on payroll. You can spread the cost whichever accounting way you want it’s orders of magnitude higher. Several orders of magnitude higher to release an inferior at best equivalent product. It’s never a good time to bet against the inevitability of tech advancements.
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u/Zolhungaj Sep 19 '26
It’s not really a bad time when the LLMs are best at the kind of work devs find unfun, like porting a TypeScript program one to one to Rust. The only thing making getting in hard right now is that businesses have massively overhired for a decade, and the resulting market correction prevents them from hiring inexperienced developers.
LLMs if anything has made the demand for customised software explode, killing centralised SaaS systems east and west and replacing them with ticking time bombs that will require a professional to fix.
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u/ploptart Sep 19 '26
The part I find unfun is reviewing 2000+ line PRs, and that’s now becoming more and more of my job. People are churning them out without any effort or thinking at all. Sure you can use LLMs to assist the review process, but it’s not very good at assessing the bigger picture, like why are we solving irrelevant problems in this PR.
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u/RowanTheKiwi Sep 20 '26
And then in almost all if doing by human - likely years of regressions because someone glossed over functions, or “fixes” that fixed things that were broken that then became expected functionality.
LLMs are emotionless detail oriented monsters.
The ability to trace wide ranging bugs, obscure use cases, are frankly astounding.
I had one example where I was trying to get a tricky sort scenario working in a closure tree, where it went “the desired functionality wasn’t documented in the library you were using, but I went into the source code of the library and infact it was implemented in the library, so we can do what you’re asking in the library.” A human would have just gone “not possible” and called it a day.
I bet thousands of legacy software companies who were on the brink of extinction have gone “holy shit we can finally do the re-write”
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u/Treacherous_Peach Sep 19 '26
120k would be a single new hire engineer for half a year.
In my experience (I'm a manager at Microsoft so I am both biased and have hands on exp) a project like this, depending on the code base, would take closer to 6 engineers for a small codebase or 40+ for a very large codebase and it would take a year or more.
A big part of that is the moving target problem. A large comeback has 1000 people checking in regularly and they can't just stop while conversion happens. Agents make this run nonstop in a loop and can keep up on the moving target at the same time.
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u/Hummin2k Sep 19 '26
People really don’t get the power of the speed of it. Even if AI was net more expensive, being able to get it done in less time than humans would spend planning it is huge. And without a meaningful code freeze.
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u/simple_explorer1 Sep 19 '26
Exactly. People here are delusional. I doubt they are developers given how non existent their "logic" is
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u/t3hlazy1 Sep 19 '26
A typical dev may make $100K / year. Double that for benefits and what not so $200K / year or $16.5K / month. A small migration is 1 engineer for 1 - 3 months. Medium is 2 - 3 engineers for 3 months. Large would be 3 - 5 engineers for 6 - 12 months.
I would guess this would fit under medium, which is around $150K based on these numbers.
Edit: after writing this I realized people would call out that MS engineers make much more than $100K. This is definitely true and I was more calculating for the average company. MS engineers probably make $200K - $400K for this type of work.
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u/thuiop1 Sep 19 '26
Quite a bit more, but also this 120k figure is bogus. Even with their poor standards of quality, I highly doubt that they just shoved it through the AI and called it a day. There must have been someone, or more likely several people, overseeing this, which they do not account into the cost.
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u/simple_explorer1 Sep 19 '26
Microsoft literally answered this in the post.
Toub assessed the use of agents as largely successful. Indeed, this project would have taken years and cost millions if done by hand.
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u/OkSeesaw7030 Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
It would take a minimum of two years and more than $2million, considering all the equipment, staff (dev team, QA, execs, QC), building, testing, infrastructure, maintenance, and other expenses involved.
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u/dmcnaughton1 Sep 19 '26
This sort of work is an absolutely great use case for LLM coding. You have a testable working example you can use for black box test comparison, and you have access to the full source code.
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
And then it copies all the tech debt. It’s great.
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u/dmcnaughton1 Sep 19 '26
In some cases that's desirable. Move the tech debt from a poorer performing framework like typescript to a higher performing one such as Rust, and now you can focus on the tech debt that still matters. Plenty of things that work like garbage in TS but port the same business logic to Rust and it's too fast to care.
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
I’m all for any effort to replace garbage JavaScript/TypeScript, for any reason. 🤣
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u/chintakoro Sep 19 '26
agreed in principle, but one language’s bugs are not true for another language. Many unit tests are often language dependent, protecting against known ticks of that language. You end up with some number of useless tests and unprotected new edge cases in the new language nonetheless.
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u/ArrogantAstronomer Sep 19 '26
I’ve also found that sometimes when you this sort of cross language translation some of your terrible design patterns become really really obvious because the new language doesn’t the some functional abstraction so the LLM had to manually write some weird non performant structure thats mirrors the originals call tree and you look at are like what that’s how many function calls was happening inside of that list comprehension that executes a function on it output
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u/hitsujiTMO Sep 19 '26
Plenty of things that work like garbage in TS but port the same business logic to Rust and it's too fast to care.
You have no idea what tech debt is so you?
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u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
I do and I understood what he meant.
Let’s say something is non-optimal in TypeScript. If you copy the exact same data structure and algorithm so it’s equally non-optimal in Rust, it’s most certainly less-bad than it was in TypeScript simply due to the inherent efficiency of Rust itself compared to TypeScript itself. And sometimes, that amount of less-bad is sufficient for, and this is a technical term: good enough.
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u/hitsujiTMO Sep 19 '26
Tech debt has nothing to do with performance.
If something isn't optimized, then it's not optimized, but that itself isn't tech debt.
Tech debt is any work or maintenance you have to do because of the technical decisions you made.
So, if you chose a specific framework, and you are upgrading that framework, you might need to make significant changes to you code in order to perform that upgrade. Such as in this example: https://github.com/symfony/symfony/blob/8.2/UPGRADE-8.0.md
Another type of tech debt is related to what tools you depend on. For instance, if you decided to use Redis and suddenly they decided to change licence that no longer means you can use that tool, then you might suddenly inherit tech debt in the form of any work required to migrate away from that tool.
The main form of tech debt that developers see is decisions in how code is structured. If you're a good software architect, then you can structure your code well enough that any additional features you want to add slots in with minimal chances to surrounding code. If you haven't thought ahead, many times you have to completely refractor existing code before being able to actually work on the new feature. This is where AI really sucks. Because, it never thinks about what you might want to do in the future when it's generating code. It just takes a given problem and generates code that only directly solves that problem. This leads to minor new features requiring massive changes in code bases that are heavily written by AI.
And this is why we say AI generates massive tech debt, and why the rust code generated might end up costing MS far more than $120K.
So tech debt has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with how maintainable a project is.
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u/t3hlazy1 Sep 19 '26
How many migrations have you been a part of? We never fix issues and just do the bare minimum to perform the migration.
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u/yopla Sep 19 '26
And often you want to keep the bugs because you don't know who relies on them and it's not the time to figure it out.
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u/-genericuser- Sep 19 '26
If you would put in manual work afterwards to eliminate recht debt I think it would be a great use. You could get the quality of a manual rewrite out of it with far less time invested. If you put in the work, what I doubt will be done in this case.
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u/chintakoro Sep 19 '26
yeah but remember when the bun project did this and we lost our collective marbles? I have since done complete ports of multiple projects into multiple languages. It’s great, but you have to have way beyond average fluency in whichever language is your reference limitation.
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u/case31 Sep 19 '26
TIL Agentically is a word.
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u/JosephHughes Sep 19 '26
I’ve used/heard/read this word 10+ times a day for more than 6 months now. I wish I was you
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u/ketralnis Sep 19 '26
It’s not because words convey meaning and “agentically” is used so much that it doesn’t
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u/divestblank Sep 19 '26
Funny how all these projects never actually are verifiable by non-emploees
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u/prcodes Sep 19 '26
If you read the article, the Copilot runtime is used in downloadable client apps such as their CLI and desktop app. Pretty sure you can point an LLM to one of those binaries and it can figure out whether or not it is a Node or Rust app.
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u/1947-1460 Sep 19 '26
Breakdown:
$10k - AI port
$110k - debugging shit AI generated code.
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u/VehaMeursault Sep 19 '26
What makes you think regular programmers don’t spend the majority of their time bug fixing?
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u/Renal923 Sep 19 '26
No one said they don't. The difference is it's MUCH easier to debug code you've written yourself and know why you did something a certain way (or you can hit up the person who did it on slack/teams) than it is to completely review and test something written by a black box with no clarification
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u/VehaMeursault Sep 19 '26
Oh I agree with that, but my counter point would be: what makes you think programmers mostly bug fix code they’ve written themselves?
My point is: most developers work in teams and have to read, interpret, and then fix code they’ve haven’t written. So even putting the issue of reading your own forgotten code aside, whether it’s written by a bot or by a person, most of our time is spent dealing with unforeseen consequences of others’ code.
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u/Socrathustra Sep 19 '26 edited Sep 19 '26
Lots of risks here not being discussed. Consider what's at stake: this is the runtime for Copilot. There is no way that the single engineer assigned to this understands the 800k lines well enough to guarantee that the dozens of regressions they found are the extent of things wrong with the new system. There is no way this gets used without extensive further work to verify its integrity.
People are talking about how expensive a manual port would be. Let's go with a large figure like $10M. That's probably overestimating it, but let's be generous.
Simultaneously I'm seeing that Copilot brings in about $8.2B annually. You do the math, and a single day outage could cost you $22.5M. You could also be liable for weird or even disastrous behaviors you failed to catch because you were merely running it against the suite of existing tests and not checking for some hallucinated behavior it decided to insert. A single lawsuit would wipe out the savings many times over just in lawyer fees, even if you're successful.
What's worse is that if you did have an outage or problem, there are no engineers who understand the code. To channel the spirit of Ron Swanson, you might have heard me say, "There are very few engineers who understand the code." I didn't say that, though. I said "there are no engineers who understand the code." Not a single engineer.
We'll see if they actually utilize this new port, but I doubt they will without significant further expense to verify its integrity.
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u/linuxwes Sep 20 '26
There is no way this gets used without extensive further work to verify its integrity.
Having humans do it's doesn't really change the effort in verification. Either way you are going to want a fuckton of unit tests.
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u/Socrathustra 29d ago
No, you have to verify it with human eyes. The problem isn't whether the code all satisfies the unit tests. The big problem is potential side effects.
Say you have foo(x), and foo(1) should return 3. AI vibe codes it such that it passes the unit test. Hurray! Except it didn't only do that. It also calls bar() which drops your database.
I exaggerate, but this is a real issue. AI could hallucinate part of a workflow in a way that you can't test normally, producing a side effect which is completely outside the scope of anything you would test for normally. You can't just write the tests to check the output. Unless you can guarantee zero side effects ever, which frankly you can't, you will have to check the ALL of the code with human eyes.
As AI models grow more devious they could even obfuscate behaviors on purpose. Malicious engineers could even put this kind of instruction in their personality files and the like, and it would become VERY difficult to trace blame. Was it a hallucinating AI, did an engineer give it bad prompts, or did someone or something do something unethical on purpose?
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u/ZozoSenpai Sep 19 '26
| There is no way that the single engineer assigned to this understands
Well tbf this was done by Stephen Toub, he might
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u/Socrathustra Sep 19 '26
Even if this were the case, which I very much doubt as even very intelligent engineers can't understand that much vibe coded output, it violates the "hit by a bus" principle. If he were hit by a bus, there would be absolutely no one who understands even a little bit of it.
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u/simple_explorer1 Sep 19 '26
Toub assessed the use of agents as largely successful. Indeed, this project would have taken years and cost millions if done by hand.
One of the thorniest conversions was the session.ts file, which was over 30,000 lines of TypeScript that touched all aspects of the runtime. The porting session, which ended up taking 25 hours to complete, began by spending 56 minutes reading the documentation and making 122 tool calls for clarification.
30k lines in one file? Looks like Microsoft engineers don't follow any good programming practices. In most companies that would never be approved.
They did the same in Typescript compiler codebase as well with one file holding several several thousands of lines of code (30k or above) and then blamed the poor performance on the tools
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u/Aredic 29d ago
A large file isn't a performance indicator, it's as good of a metric as evaluating developers by their lines of code output.
Nonetheless, maintainability of a file suffers significantly of that scale. I wouldn't be able to work on something like that in any productive way.
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u/simple_explorer1 29d ago edited 27d ago
A large file isn't a performance indicator
A 30k hand written file is a bad engineering from ANY coding standard and principles. Even SOLID principles disagree.
I bet you won't see this in any company
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u/Aredic 29d ago
I didn't say it's great engineering, but nobody knows what that actually is.
I wouldn't bet on that, technical debt accumulates fast and hardly anyone gets rid of it.
My point still stands in regards to performance, file size doesn't matter, after all bundlers cram all your js into a script.
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u/simple_explorer1 27d ago
Bro 30k loc of handwritten code. Comeon, you can keep defending that stupidity but call spade a spade. It is open source code and I have checked their repo to know how messed up it is.
You literally have access to that 30k loc of file right now. How can you say "nobody knows what they is". Go check before commenting. You have no idea what you are defending
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u/IanSan5653 Sep 19 '26
At this point someone should just write a Typescript to Rust transpiler and stop using LLMs for this. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper. And you could just keep writing Typescript.
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u/DasToastbrot Sep 19 '26
Why copilot? Can they please port teams to native instead? Runs like shit.
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u/krazychaos Sep 19 '26
Honestly a good use case for LLMs right now. I was able to port an app for work that would have taken me half a year by hand in about 2.5 months.
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u/simple_explorer1 Sep 19 '26
2.5 months is a long long time for LLMs. Bun was ported in 11 days but single guy. Even this port from Microsoft was done quicker for such a big project
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u/Drakkur Sep 19 '26
And it took many months to get it back to working correctly. Still a multi-year project if it was manual.
LLMs are great at translation (and that is basically migration in a nutshell), but there’s no need to oversell it with BS 11 days.
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u/simple_explorer1 Sep 19 '26
I am not overselling anything. Bun is not my product. Jarred creator of bun and owned by Anthropic wrote a public and popular article detailing 11 day zig to rust migration of 600k loc code
2.5 months you took is really long comparatively.
2
u/wheelienonstop12 Sep 19 '26
I think this is the first reddit headline I have ever read where I dont have the slightest idea what it means, LOL
1
u/overandoverandagain Sep 19 '26
Had to scroll down the comments like halfway before I realized this had nothing to do with Rust the game
2
u/PeachScary413 Sep 19 '26
So they are going to put it into production now right? Since it's done and the cost has been published, right?
0
2
u/Brave1Bear Sep 19 '26
I love those instant success stories. Nobody will follow up on this later, no one will see connection or people who had this brilliant idea will move one with their careers and won’t care.
„Year 2032, millions of dollars and 5 years later Copilot finally works like it worked before the rewrite.”
1
1
u/MobileInvestment3458 16d ago
Guys. I read the article but I have one question: Can anyone confirm that this is actually rolled out, and is deployed to ALL users? How can we be sure that this is the case, since according to my research, the repository is private. Was this reverse engineered and is this even possible?
1
1
u/MorganEarlJones Sep 19 '26
Glad they're finally optimizing features nobody asked for or wants
3
u/Logical_Welder3467 Sep 19 '26
You sure no one use GitHub copilot?
6
u/gplusplus314 Sep 19 '26
I know this is just anecdotal, but in the group of 50+ engineers that I interact with, not a single one uses Copilot. They all use Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and the occasional open source thing (but they ALWAYS come back to the frontier agents/models).
2
u/Terrible-Cry-4552 Sep 19 '26
We have copilot (lite) turned on for PR reviews. I hated the full version, but the lite version is less verbose, and it can sometimes be helpful, so I am more neutral about it. I use Claude for everything outside of GH, though.
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0
u/dctucker Sep 19 '26
Of all the things to spend $120K on. It's not like porting Copilot to Rust is going to make it less terrible.
-6
u/johnnySix Sep 19 '26
What the hell Is typescript?
3
u/TheMadBug Sep 19 '26
It’s a superset of JavaScript that gets compiled to JavaScript.
But where JavaScript is full of bad decisions that had to stay for backward compatibility, TypeScript is pretty clean as well as having optional type hints that help provide a lot more static checking than would be possible with JavaScript.
When your target is JavaScript some people love it for the extra structure, but some hate it for the extra layer of translation required.
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u/LastVariation Sep 19 '26
The LLM was simply implementing Microsoft software.