DHH's AI-written Rust rewrite of Campfire runs 19-44x faster, drawing engineer pushback
tekbog · x · 2026-09-29
- DHH demoed a beta Rust rewrite of Campfire, built entirely by AI without him ever reading the Rust code. The result is 6x more verbose and still "ugly," but the conversion was nearly free. The port is pixel-for-pixel identical to the Rails app, reuses its existing SQLite database and storage directory, ships as a single executable, and runs 19–44x faster, keeping the frontend (CSS, Stimulus, Turbo, Lexxy) untouched. Open-sourced as basecamp/once-campfire-rust.
- tekbog pushed back: DHH means well, but saying "we have unlimited tokens" (they don't) and "just rewrite it in Rust" without an engineering-based analysis does a disservice to engineers.
Related event: DHH's AI-Driven Rust Rewrite of Campfire Draws Engineer Criticism(2 posts)→
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