Using go fix to modernize Go code

I really liked this part:

In December 2024, during the frenzied adoption of LLM coding assistants, we became aware that such tools tended—unsurprisingly—to produce Go code in a style similar to the mass of Go code used during training, even when there were newer, better ways to express the same idea. Less obviously, the same tools often refused to use the newer ways even when directed to do so in general terms such as “always use the latest idioms of Go 1.25.” In some cases, even when explicitly told to use a feature, the model would deny that it existed. [...] To ensure that future models are trained on the latest idioms, we need to ensure that these idioms are reflected in the training data, which is to say the global corpus of open-source Go code.

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munk-a an hour ago | parent | next [-]

PHP went through a similar effort a while back to just clear out places like Stackoverflow of terrible out of date advice (e.g. posts advocating magic_quotes). LLMs make this a slightly different problem because, for the most part, once the bad advice is in the model it's never going away. In theory there's an easier to test surface around how good the advice it's giving is but trying to figure out how it got to that conclusion and correct it for any future models is arcane. It's unlikely that model trainers will submit their RC models to various communities to make sure it isn't lying about those specific topics so everything needs to happen in preparation of the next generation and relying on the hope that you've identified the bad source it originally trained on and that the model will actually prioritize training on that same, now corrected, source.

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robviren 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have run into that a lot which is annoying. Even though all the code compiles because go is backwards compatible it all looks so much different. Same issue for python but in that case the API changes lead to actual breakage. For this reason I find go to be fairly great for codegen as the stability of the language is hard to compete with and the standard lib a powerful enough tool to support many many use cases.

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BiraIgnacio 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I definitely see that with C++ code Not so easy to "fix", though. Or so I think. But I do hope still, as more and more "modern" C++ code gets published

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HumblyTossed an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The use of LLMs will lead to homogeneous, middling code.

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cedws 21 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It does. I’ve been writing Go for long enough, and the code that LLMs output is pretty average. It’s what I would expect a mid level engineer to produce. I still write code manually for stuff I care about or where code structure matters.

Maybe the best way is to do the scaffolding yourself and use LLMs to fill the blanks. That may lead to better structured code, but it doesn’t resolve the problem described above where it generates suboptimal or outdated code. Code is a form of communication and I think good code requires an understanding of how to communicate ideas clearly. LLMs have no concept of that, it’s just gluing tokens together. They litter code with useless comments while leaving the parts that need them most without.

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awesome_dude an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure if that's a criticism or praise - I mean, most people strive for readable code.

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candiddevmike an hour ago | parent [-]

LLM generated code reminds me of perl's "write-only" reputation.

	▲	awesome_dude 19 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In all honesty I've only used LLMs in anger with Go, and come away (generally speaking) happy with what it produced.

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retrodaredevil an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think tooling that can modify your source code to make it more modern is really cool stuff. OpenRewrite comes to mind for Java, but nothing comes to the top of my mind for other languages. And heck, I into recently learned about OpenRewrite and I've been writing Java for a long time.

Even though I don't like Go, I acknowledge that tooling like this built right into the language is a huge deal for language popularity and maturity. Other languages just aren't this opinionated about build tools, testing frameworks, etc.

I suspect that as newer languages emerge over the years, they'll take notes from Go and how well it integrates stuff like this.

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kiernanmcgowan an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Its tooling like this that really makes golang an excellent language to work with. I had missed that rangeint addition to the language but with go fix I'll just get that improvement for free!

Real kudos to the golang team.

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jjice an hour ago | parent [-]

There have been many situations where I'd rather use another language, but Go's tooling is so good that I still end up writing it in Go. So hard to beat the build in testing, linting, and incredible compilation.

	▲	iamcalledrob an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely. The Go team has built such trust with backwards compatibility that improvements like this are exciting, rather than anxiety-inducing. Compare that with other ecosystems, where APIs are constantly shifting, and everything seems to be @Deprecated or @Experimental.