![Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
[W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build
There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to trust his work without looking into it, and if you look into it a bit, you'll see that in testing pgrust, he's testing thoroughly enough that he's even uncovering real bugs in Postgres, such as this numerical bug that can cause valid SP-GiST operations to fail, this format cache bug that can cause incorrect results from JSONPath, this pgcrypto bug that can cause later operations to fail, multiple memory safety bugs in the dictionary loader, this money overflow bug, etc.
This isn't to say that pgrust i...](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HVbOGdKboAAAbtO.png?name=small&format=webp)
ALT Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to trust his work without looking into it, and if you look into it a bit, you'll see that in testing pgrust, he's testing thoroughly enough that he's even uncovering real bugs in Postgres, such as this numerical bug that can cause valid SP-GiST operations to fail, this format cache bug that can cause incorrect results from JSONPath, this pgcrypto bug that can cause later operations to fail, multiple memory safety bugs in the dictionary loader, this money overflow bug, etc. This isn't to say that pgrust i...

ALT The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly, but some variant of what Nolan Lawson said about testing, you can choose how many bugs you want now, which I less eloquently noted here, is becoming more true for performance. In response to a comment in my last post that the cost of formerly specialized performance work has dropped by many orders of magnitude and performance work that used to require a person or team that had a rare set of skills can be done by anyone who can type a few sentences1, which means that you can do all sorts of optimizations that used to be too expensive to be worthwhile for all but the largest scale or most lucrative projects, Marc Brooker responded with Completely agree with your closing point. Dynamic custom software, fitted to a part...












