Yes. It's that thing — the fact that a language helps you read what a single function does really easily, but in so doing makes the entire codebase quite dense, is not optimal for us, but is good for them.

And the things that we do to manage this, that are symbolic or based on visceral real-world analogy, are good for us and bad for them.

Go is kind of in the middle, in the way that many vaguely Wirth-like and CSP-like languages possibly are, I guess.

I dont think we need simpler types for agentic coding though. We need compiler speed. I guess those are probably related to some degree though.

It's surely better than Kotlin in simplicity and maintainability. It also doesn't tie you to the JVM.

What if you want a single language that's pretty fast while simple and maintainable?

> In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding? I mean isn’t whats left just design and architecture and testing?

No, because good understanding of design comes from programming experience. Atrophied skills mean you lose touch with the actual nuts and bolts of what you are building.

This is also the worst kind of lock-in you can imagine, by outsourcing all of your understanding of a codebase and your skills you are now completely at the mercy of LLM providers. Even if you switch to open weight models you're at the mercy of graphics cards producers and scalpers.

> Sure, if LLMs are producing shit code you need to have an understanding of what it should do instead. But I think that day is already gone.

Maybe your standards are too low. By my standard, they still produce shit code and require lots of iterations to get reasonable designs (I often end up just rewriting the bits that are obviously wrong rather than trying to figure out how to "prompt engineer" the right output).

They do often produce passable code but my experience is the longer you spend reading the code the more things you find wrong with it, almost like an uncanny valley.

At least that's my experience with Opus and Fable. Maybe it's too old-fashioned at this point to complain about code quality, but I find it very strange how many people have started proclaiming that their code quality is good.

If it helps, imagine they were talking about something like drawing or painting or stitching or sculpting instead of coding.

You don't expect everyone to stop wanting to do those just because they can be automated more or less effectively, right?

> In theory wouldn’t atrophied coding skills not matter if models are sufficiently good at coding?

I am begging HN users to understand that some people enjoy writing software themselves

This is like saying that a strong man would rather dig a hole with his bare hands than use a shovel. Structured programming languages are force multipliers, it makes absolutely zero sense to forego them just so you can vibe assembly directly.

Use a working Go program as the prompt+oracle for cross-language port or direct generation.

You can't PGO that code, though. Also, I'm not sure it can generate architecture specific optimized (-march, -mtune) code as well.

Considering it just pulls and remixes blocks, this is a very tall order for today's LLMs, and maybe a couple of generations as well.

Calling GCC/clang at the back and emitting ASM is both cheating and has no advantages whatsoever as well.