Quamina + Claude, Case 2

Last time out I described a bunch of incremental-improvement Quamina PRs from a colleague working with Claude Opus. Today I want to talk about Rishi Baldawa’s quamina-rs, a Claude-based port of Quamina from Go to Rust. The next post is about where I stand on GenAI and code.

Anybody who cares about this kind of thing will appreciate Rishi’s write-ups, starting with The Agents Kept Going (also see Scaffolding for Agent Velocity). He doesn’t just say what he did, he draws lessons; good ones, I think.

Background · Rishi and I worked together at AWS, can’t remember the details, but after I left he took over what we called Ruler, now known as aws/event-ruler, Quamina’s ancestor. At the time I left it had been adopted by quite a number of AWS and Amazon services and various instances were processing, in aggregate, a remarkable number of millions of events per second. So he knows the territory.

As for quamina-rs, go read his blogs. I’ve got little to add, but here are a couple of juicy quotes: “…at some point while I was mindlessly kicking off these sessions, the agents started picking up open issues from the Go version and implementing them on their own.“ Also, “And I think that’s the thing worth saying plainly. It’s human to care. Agents don’t care. Automation doesn’t care. They need to be told what to care about, and even then they’ll misbehave the moment you look away…”

Both these stories ended with useful results. So empirically, you can get useful results by applying GenAI to the process of code construction.

Yay. I guess. But there are a lot of smart people think this whole LLM-fueled coding direction is irremediably toxic. I’m not sure they’re wrong.