a recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI. “It passed all the unit tests, the shape of the code looks right,” he said. It’s 3.7x more lines of code that performs 2,000 times worse than the actual SQLite. Two thousand times worse for a database is a non-viable product. It’s a dumpster fire. Throw it away. All that money you spent on it is worthless."
Insurers, he said, are already lobbying state-level insurance regulators to win a carve-out in business insurance liability policies so they are not obligated to cover AI-related workflows. “That kills the whole system,” Deeks said. Smiley added: “The question here is if it’s all so great, why are the insurance underwriters going to great lengths to prohibit coverage for these things? They’re generally pretty good at risk profiling.”
Wow.
2000x worse, huh?
I mean… I’m impressed that it runs, passes unti tests, and ‘works’, but is also that much worse.
That’s a kind of achievement.
Not a useful kind, but… impressively bad.
Also it’s probably incredibly difficult to optimize a huge LLM-generated codebase since there are no human authors who know it intimately to begin with.
Having a stable set of individuals with a deep understanding of ‘how things work’ is so totally anathema to the modern paradigm of ‘every coder is is a contractor, basically’.
Everybody wants to do software development, but doesn’t want to foster software developers.
So, they try and build machine god to replace us, and as most of us predicted… didn’t work out so well, but goddamnit, they’ll burn a trillion dollars before they let their ego take a hit.
… oh well, I guess.
Reminds me of the Claude fluff article that mentions that reverts have only increased 0.04%.
It made big noise that the number of Pull Requests has doubled though.
Logically because you have one PR from an LLM, then another by a human to fix the LLM slop.
Or a large number (vast majority I’d bet) of LLM generated PRs are going unmerged. No need to revert something that hasn’t been merged.
Tbh I see myself using AI for shits and giggles. (nothing helpful)
I try not to use it alot due to the ethics it comes with it.In fairness to LLMs, (which I run locally) I’ve been able to use them for like, bits of code that are roughly 200 lines or less.
Or like, feed it a code base and say hey, make sure all the comments are formatted the same way.
But uh, for… trying to engineer an entire system?
Nope nope nope, they get very confused, very fast, as overall conplexity increases.
@rimu How does it get worse at all?! SQLite has quite a few vtables, and Rust has monomorphisation, so it should be possible to do better on benchmarks.
(I have occasionally thought about rewriting SQLite in Rust before regaining my senses.)
@rimu “Fake it 'till you make it” does not work with artefacts. It may help you form habits, but if it’s not your attitude that is the problem, but rather the tool, then “Fake it 'till you make it” *will lead to the emperors new clothes* .
