“My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft distinguished engineer Galen Hunt wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
Well, I expect it’ll be exciting, one way or another.
This gives the curse “may you live in interesting times” vibes
You know it’s going to be successful when they go back to using antiquated productivity measurements like measuring based on lines of code in a time frame. We all know AI is fucking spectacular at generating overly verbose code.
I think the number of lines to be deleted is the target 1M…
yeah it’s “replace 1M lines of current code with whatever it takes to do the same task.”
they are speedrunning enshitification 🐧
Enshittification does not mean making things suck in general. It specifically means the business model of making a good product for users, then making the product bad for users and good for advertisers or data purchasers or retailers or whatever, and then when you have a captured market, making it worse for everyone to squeeze more money faster.
Microsoft is not doing this. They might be sucking, and making a worse product, but it’s not following the enshittification playbook.
points to ads in the start menu and surveillance in the OS
Pardon me, but that is exactly what MS is doing.
So to be paid I have to delete 1M lines of code every month. Gotcha.
I always love how business bros use the term “Algorithm(s)” (and now also “AI”) as if that was just a magic incantation or something that you just switch on and it immediately solves whatever problem you might have.
All that’s needed is that the wizard comes up with the right spell and then everything just works and the business is generating infinite money!
Replace the spaghetti with slop. Sounds like a great idea.
Surely there’s no way for Microsoft to vibe-fuck their OS.
Surely.
Surely.
That’s OK. I’m using Linux. Perhaps this will drive more people to Linux. The less people using corporate owned tools the better.
“Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s largest codebases,” he added. “Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
This could have been good news, however, Microsoft’s insistance on using AI, and general incompetence even without it, makes me very doubtful this will be successful.
They are going to try and replace C and C++ written by actual experts a few decades ago, with Rust written by idiots. Expect tons of logic bugs, and very little measurable difference in memory corruption.
little measurable difference? the last time they rewrote something they replaced the start menu with fucking react
the difference will be measurable and enormous
Isn’t React technically safer for memory ? I was only talking about memory corruption, Rust’s actual main strength.
Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely terrible that they shoved JavaScript in the start menu. It’s buggy as hell, but I don’t think it can ever segfault.
perhaps… i guess the single directional execution model would help to prevent memory leaks, and components would help keep things relatively contained… and also javascript in general avoids whole classes of c/c++ bugs… but it’s also incredibly slow. imo it’s just not something you should write core system components in
to be clear, it’s not react that’s the problem here: its execution model is an excellent way of structuring UI… but something as core as the start menu just really isn’t something you should fuck around with slow languages with
and also, that’s not to say that FOSS shouldn’t do it - they’re open, and thus something like react makes it easier for devs to write plugs and extend etc… but that’s not an engineering concern for windows: they don’t get the luxury of using extensibility as an excuse
All the black hats are going to have a field day uncovering all manner of zero-day exploits…
No no no you see, they’re using rust, which is a ‘safe’ language. That means it’s not possible to have security issues…
I look forward to the total and complete collapse of Microsoft in the computer marketplace.
Plans move to Rust, with help from AI
As if AI could handle the mountains of checks Rust has you account for.
AI: This is unsafe. This is also unsafe. This third one? Unsafe.
I’m my experience, LLMs are especially bad at Rust. They really don’t seem to grasp the borrow checker.
I used Rust with Deepseek for a small project for copying and pasting snippets and it went pretty well, but I wouldn’t trust it to work with and debug a codebase on its own, especially not an OS
While I agree that I don’t think that an LLM is going to do the heavy lifting of making full use of Rust’s type system, I assume that Rust has some way of overriding type-induced checks. If your goal is just to get to a mechanically-equivalent-to-C++ Rust version, rather than making full use of its type system to try to make the code as correct as possible, you could maybe do that. It could provide the benefit of a starting place to start using the type system to do additional checks.
unsafe { <the whole codebase> }The safety designed into Rust is suddenly foreign to the C family that I’m honestly not sure you can do that. Even “unsafe” Rust doesn’t completely switch off the enforced safety
Yeah, to quote the manual:
"[Unsafe Rust allows you to]
- Dereference a raw pointer.
- Call an unsafe function or method.
- Access or modify a mutable static variable.
- Implement an unsafe trait.
- Access fields of unions.
[…] The unsafe keyword only gives you access to these five features that are then not checked by the compiler for memory safety."
If they rely on UB at all, then this won’t work. At best you get a compile time error, but more likely your rust program will do weird stuff with memory. And given how much people rely on compilers “acting nice” when it comes to aliasing (something rust does not fuck around with), I wouldn’t hold my breathe
This sounds like a great idea, I might finally be able to use Linux at work in the future.
reimplement … with help from AI
Meaning, it will have more bugs and less features after.
I tried vibe coding a rust project and it was total ass.
AI doesn’t reason, so it heavily depends on what’s been presented in the training set.
Python is everywhere and most importantly whatever you can think exists in Python, from critical bioinformatics tools to somebody learning programming from the first time and posting their prime number finder or sorting algorithm online.
Rust? Not at that point yet, so the AI fails
Yeah, for everything I’ve seen it’s just a classical case of overfitment. I only tried it because it was recommended to me by a coworker. It failed at problem solving and choosing comparable dependencies. Completely jarring because like you said, it could likely do it in JS and Python. But clearly not Rust. I often wonder if the code you get from AI is +85% stolen verbatim.
JS and Python code is equally garbage.
In Python it can work but sometimes with crazy inefficient methods incorporated. In obscure geospatial stuff it often loses the plot. Still occasionally recommends functions that don’t exist
I dunno man, I tried coding a simply http listener with an LLM one time in python (a language I’m unfamiliar with). Just something to sit on a port, listen for a request, and run a script.
I ended up spending more time troubleshooting the maybe two dozen lines of code than I would have spent just looking up a tutorial online.
My experience exactly. We gotta just read the docs.
This is what you get when AI fanaticism combines with Rust fanaticism.
1 million lines a month is 2-ish line per second. That “engineer” is just someone to blame when things don’t work. They aren’t going to be contributing anything.
I was about to say that surely it’s not just 1 person they are talking about. Then I read, "Our North Star is ‘1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.’”
WTF
I mean, if this is true and it works it is not too far fetched. You’d mostly be checking that tests still make sense and that they pass.
Microsoft scientists have worked on a tool that automatically converts some C code to Rust.
The expensive autocomplete can’t do this.
AI markering all wants us to believe that spoon technology is this close to space flight. We just need to engrave the spoons better. And gold plate them thicker.
Dude who wrote that doesn’t understand how LLMs work, how Rust works, how C works, and clearly jack shit about programming in general.
Rewriting from one paradigm to another isn’t something you can delegate to a million monkeys shitting into typewriters. The core and time-consuming part of the work itself requires skilled architectural coding.
LLMs are - by the nature of how they work - only able to achieve 90-95% accuracy. That’s the theoretical best they can do, according to the people behind OpenAI. And worse, it will be presented as 100% accurate, even going so far as to make up sources wholecloth.
That’s an insane and completely unacceptable error rate for any system even pretending to be mission critical.
Can you imagine sending people to space with a system that has a 1 in 20 chance of just being completely unfit for service?
Well, in that case they’re overstating their capabilities. Which is not too surprising.
But when they don’t pass, then you have to dissect a bunch of AI pasta, right?
No, you go to your manager and be like: your machine to make C code into rust code does not work. If you want to keep the pace of 1M loc per month and keep your boss happy I need double pay and 10 people working on it at all time.
But when your boss tells you that you have to keep doing it this way, then you don’t have much choice in the matter. You either keep asking AI for new code and hope it gets it right, or you have to actually delve into the code and spend your time correcting it.
The 1 million lines of code is just untenable, assuming they want code that actually works.
Well, if that’s the case you do the job in the way you yourself judge best. Maybe that tool is good at some tasks and you apply it to that. Bill Gates will be sad for a couple months and then likely forget about the expectations which had been set and you yourself got a stable job with a safe position for years to come.
You’d mostly be checking that tests still make sense and that they pass.
Nah, my experience is most of your time is finding out what parameter or function call they made up because its mathematically a good answer.
Get out your popcorn because this should be fun to watch. They’re already vibe coding all of the value and stability out of their OS.
As someone who only still has a Window install because Wine can’t handle the CAD tools I rely on, I look forward to the day when Linux becomes a more attractive platform to release professional software for. I’m not holding my breath for the Year of the Linux Desktop but I can certainly enjoy the ride of MS’s self sabotage to get there.
Have you tried Winboat? Don’t know about CAD but it can handle Photoshop well.
WinBoat is amazing, but it doesn’t have GPU passthrough yet. That one feature is the holy grail for Windows virtualization on Linux. I hope the WinBoat team can solve it.
I’m afraid that’s going to be a long way off.
KVM can do it, but usually only to one kernel. Not sure if you can have multiple kernels handling one GPU.
Will this finally be the end of Windows?
Also fun fact: Windows uses a lot of COM Interfaces for API, which in my opinion often makes developing for Windows a better experience, than developing for Linux. Rust does not have anything OOP related by default, and are often emulated with macros instead, like in C.
I work for a company developing software for Windows and deal with COM all the time. How do you communicate across dynamic libraries and languages in Linux?
Linux usually just uses C API, most of which reads horribly. Libevdev is quite notorious for using files and the docs not telling you that the reading is blocking. Some additional things use C++ classes though.
Could you provide a link to the documentation? It’s strange that it’s so barebones.
That’s a crazy take. I hate com and oop with a passion. If you like com that much there’s gobject for you on Linux.
I hate everything GTK/GNOME, they didn’t even call it
gnobject.
A vibe coded Windows 12. Sounds… interesting, mildly…
“a stupid fucking OS for stupid fucking people”
Just fucking stop please
Yet another good time to get off of Windows
It’s always a good time to get off of Windows!
Incoming brainrot-video from Bryan Lunduke in 3…2…1
(With react native)
