When AI writes the code: lessons from a 300x Postgres rewrite and building AI employees
leebase65 · reddit · 2026-09-16
The author tackles the identity anxiety of "what's left for humans when AI codes": vibe coding isn't all of AI-assisted development—human value lies in setting goals, judging quality, and making design decisions.
- Cites an AI-driven Postgres-to-Rust rewrite: the first four attempts failed; the fifth succeeded. It's not a bug-for-bug port but a subsystem-by-subsystem improvement, now 300x faster than stock Postgres—gains come from human design changes, not Rust itself
- The author's own lesson: a near-year of orchestrator/"AI employee" work stayed brittle even when Astra ran 24h stretches, so he scrapped it and rebuilt from the minimal essence of what an AI employee needs
- Takeaway: AI grows the pie rather than replacing people—the rewrite had no $100M budget behind it, and solo devs gain "staff" they could never afford
More from AGI Musings
- Jason Wei: Wet-Lab Data Lets Specialized Models Beat GPT-6 Astra at Frontier Science — vwxyzjn · 2026-09-16
- 20-Year-Old Dropouts Became Billionaires in 3 Years by Cornering the Post-Training Data Bottleneck — smtabatabaie · 2026-09-16
- Viral post with 2M+ views: zoomers say AI firms want regulation to secure bailouts — typewriters · 2026-09-16
- AI 2027 authors pitch Plan A: delay superintelligence to 2040 with fully open AI research — Turn_Trout · 2026-09-16
- EA's media capture and doomer headlines skew public AI perception, argues Nahom Sisay — NathanpmYoung · 2026-09-16
- What do we call the 'it was ever thus' rhetoric used to dismiss AI concerns? — jjvincent · 2026-09-16