Here's a recent Raft story from when I was trying to learn how to use it. I'm working on coding a multiplayer io game for fun. One key part was that it needs replication of game state so that live games can fail over if one of the servers crashes or is restarted.
I was like, "wait, that's what raft does, and my game state is already a state machine ... let's do this thing". I then ended up putting my entire game state into raft, and even abused it as a generic pubsub engine.
It was fun, and it worked, and was actually not hard to setup using the Rust implementation.
Then when I was done, I realized how pathological it was to put literally all game state and every single event into Raft, so decided to stop indulging myself by having fun and trying to hack Raft into an unintended use case, and just used Redis for game state and pubsub.
I never load tested the Raft implementation, but once I do have some perf testing tools, I'd be interesting to run the Raft code vs. Redis comparison to see how throughput differs. For this use case, at some point Raft should fall over while Redis would be chugging along.
It depends!!! If you do something like Consul does where you cram “events” into a radix tree that you send as one big batch it should scale quite well. I wouldn’t expect batched Redis performance but it should be within 70-80% of it in my guess.
There's a trend of "io games" which are so named because the first one was hosted on a site called "agar.io". then was followed by slither.io and so on. They are characterized by a few distinctive qualities: they're entirely browser-based, players are instantly dropped into a big lobby with tons of other players, they typically have simplistic graphics (e.g. powered by canvas), they have no long-term progression (once you die you restart from the beginning), and they have some kind of leaderboard where you can see the players in your shard that have progressed the farthest since the last time they died.
> They wrote off the coding ability of ChatGPT on version 3.5, for instance, and have missed all the advancements that have happened since.
> It's hardly even useful for coding.
I’m curious what kind of projects you’re writing where AI coding agents are barely useful.
It’s the “shills” on YouTube that keep me up to date with the latest developments and best practices to make the most of these tools. To me it makes tools like CC not only useful but indispensable. Now I do not focus on writing the thing, but I focus on building agents who are capable of building the thing with a little guidance.
I think most developers bypass the typing of the trivial part by just using a library or a framework. And sometimes typing trivial things can be relaxing, especially after an intense bout with a complex thing.
Being forced to type in trivial boilerplate means you're very motivated to abstract it. Not saying this'll offset anything but I can see AI making codebases much more verbose
While people's experience with LLMs is pretty varied and subjective, saying they're bad at writing tests just isn't true. Claude Code is incredible at writing tests and testing infrastructure.
It worth mentioning that one should tell CC to not overmock, and to produce only truly relevant tests. I use an agent that I invoke to spot this stuff, because I've run into some truly awful overmocked non-tests before.
Off topic but my dad took me around the woods this weekend to show me mushrooms and he almost couldn’t contain his excitement. And this is a person who usually doesn’t like stuff. And the whole time I was like “yep, that’s a mushroom”. There’s clearly something fascinating about the hobby that I don’t get (yet). Curious to hear your take.
Your dad sounds like a good sort. I have no idea how to explain the mushroom fascination that some of us have to those that lack it and have mostly learned to just not talk about mushrooms with people who don't have the fascination.
Yeah, I think volatility in the indian market was way too low, and Jane street just juiced it. normally that would be a losing proposition, but too many existing players were short volatility habitually… answer is not to kick Jane street out, but to enjoy the taxes Jane street pays on the gains…
Low volatility is good for everyone engaged in long term asset management. Jane Street just found a way to make everyone else less money while making a small amount for themselves.
it’s a known effect. Without going into details here, you can calculate first crossing time of a barrier in a stochastic process and observe that often the first crossing time decreases as the volatility increases. From there you can set one barrier at 0 (default) and draw your own conclusion.
I'm reminded of how the UK financial regulator banned "binary options" trading, since this was nearly always a scam run against unsophisticated retail investors who wanted to gamble and lost the majority of their "investment".
(one of the Yes Minister irregular verbs: I am providing liquidity to the market, you are long vega, he is a degenerate gambler)
I never thought that Go would be a technology of choise for PL stuff. I always considered it more of a Java-lite for Web systems and also for CLI stuff, but here we are! TypeScript rewrote their compiler to Go. Being a compiler, they had no use of piggy backing on the GC, looks like they just liked the language.
Typescript chose Go specicfically because they didn't rewrite it. Go has close enough semantics to TypeScript that they could write a Go backend for tsc and do a machine port to Go and continue working from that
Also the way the port was sold is a bit misleading, because as described on BUILD 2025 session, they had anyway to redo the whole datastructures due to the more basic Go's type system.
Meanwhile Azure is rewriting C++ into Rust with AI tooling, see Microsoft talks at Rust Nation UK 2025.
Looks like he was laid off, not fired. But so what? Layoffs have their own weird logic. It doesn’t tell us anything about how the project is perceived internally to Microsoft.
No, but it does tell us that MSFT leadership are quite inept if they are firing a clearly qualified engineer capable of doing hard work under the guise of cost savings.
Isn't general MSFT bashing a bit off topic in this thread?
Also, it's discourteous to the individual in question to keep incorrectly stating that they were fired. The distinction between being fired and being laid off is an important one (especially if the person in question is applying for jobs).
Fired and layoffs are a distinction that no worker cares about, I'm sure he'd rather be working than getting laid off for "performance reasons."
If you were ever given the option to collect unemployment insurance, this includes taking a severance package where you stipulate to not pursue unemployment insurance, then you were fired.
It's also important to always note that these companies do not care about their workers, they will extract you dry and throw you out.
It’s an important distinction because being fired suggests a fault on the part of the employee. Despite what you appear to suggest, there is no public information suggesting that this person was laid off for performance related reasons.
Again, what you think about Microsoft, or big tech companies in general, is completely irrelevant here. You’re spreading false information about someone. It would cost you nothing simply to stop doing it.
I used Go awhile ago for a Blockly interpreter. It's remarkably friendly; if memory serves, the ability to attach metadata to structs was pretty useful.
One hack I'm not super proud of is I implemented return and break with panic / recover. Were I to do it all over, I'd probably use continuations to model that instead.
(Side-note on Lua specifically: among the reasons I like Lua is that it's very simple and its reference interpreter implementation is some very understandable code. I did some truly horrible things to it back in the day for a game engine, and it was very amenable to getting beat up like that).
I feel unstoppable with Claude Code Max. I never thought I'd pay $200 per month for any developer tool, yet here we are, and I also couldn't be happier with it.
Maybe in the US? I will never pay 100$ for a subscription and I despise that people normalized it by even buying this stuff instead of saying "no, that's way too expensive".
Well bucko it’s time to open your wallet. There’s creatives out there who spend at least $1000/month in subscriptions for tools, but without those tools they could never do most of the work they do. And some who buy physical gear like photographs and videographers pay even way more than that for equipment.
Soon it will be the same for developers. Developers really are a spoiled bunch when it comes to paying for things, many will balk at paying $99/year just to publish stuff on an App Store. Everyone just wants free open source stuff. As expectations on developer productivity rises, you will be paying for these AI tools no matter how expensive they get, or you will just be gentrified out of the industry. The choice is yours.
I work in a cleanroom to fabricate semiconductor devices and I spend hundreds of euros per hour to use specific tools which mostly just use electricity and maintenance. Should we complain that it’s too expensive or should we use them because they’re worth the price?
Things have a price for a reason. It’s up to you whether it’s worth paying that or not.
We are talking about personal use and then people don't pay for it out of their own pocket but the company's. At least I hope so because otherwise it would be very dumb.
I’m also talking about personal use. These are research devices for my PhD. I’m obviously not paying out of pocket, but my funding agency does.
I’m trying to convey that if a tool increases your efficiency by more than it costs then it’s worth paying for it regardless of how expensive it is. It’s how the economy works.
There is no free lunch. Even if a company pays for it instead of you, their LLM costs per developer will be factored in to what they are willing to provide as compensation. So one way or another, the end result is you get paid for less for the same amount of work today.
That “if” doesn’t apply to all of us, though. Not everybody is paid by the hour. I’d love to try something like Claude code, but $100 per month is way too expensive for me, and it probably wouldn’t even give me a single extra dollar of income. I think I’ll just wait for the time when local LLMs will be good enough to be a viable alternative.
By the time you can run good enough local LLMs without splurging on sufficiently powerful hardware, those LLMs will look like toys compared to whatever cloud based LLMs are available.
That's a great question. Probably not. IDK. I'm also only paying this much to maintain momentum on a personal project. I also know in a year, these LLM products will change drastically, pricing tiers will transform, etc.. So I can't predict what will happen in a year but things will probably be cheaper.
Edit: On the other hand, the state of the art tools will also be much better in a year, so might keep that high price point!
Am I rationalizing my purchase? Possibly. If I'm not using it daily, I will cancel it, I promise :)
I think there is definitely room to price AI tools way higher. Developers are being slowly boiled like frogs right now. Getting addicted to AI tools to the point they can’t work without them, that’s when you raise the price.
I see it as an investment into my future. I was able to make progress on a personal project with Claude Code which I failed at using other tools. Yes, I will, and apparently have, paid multiple hundreds of dollars to get the project release ready. But I definitely need to keep in mind that I'm not going to at that velocity all the time, which would make the $200 price point not justifiable long term.
I just started with it, so still getting my feet wet, but it's been better than any other tool at really grokking my codebase and understanding my intent. The workflow feels better than a strict IDE integration, but it does get pricey really quickly, and you pretty much need at least the $100 Max subscription.
Luckily, it should be coming with the regular $20 Pro subscription in the near future, so it should be easier to demo and get a feel for it without having to jump in all the way.
I was like, "wait, that's what raft does, and my game state is already a state machine ... let's do this thing". I then ended up putting my entire game state into raft, and even abused it as a generic pubsub engine.
It was fun, and it worked, and was actually not hard to setup using the Rust implementation. Then when I was done, I realized how pathological it was to put literally all game state and every single event into Raft, so decided to stop indulging myself by having fun and trying to hack Raft into an unintended use case, and just used Redis for game state and pubsub.
I never load tested the Raft implementation, but once I do have some perf testing tools, I'd be interesting to run the Raft code vs. Redis comparison to see how throughput differs. For this use case, at some point Raft should fall over while Redis would be chugging along.