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If AI writes your code, why use Python?

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Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#21
You can of course use any language but here is my advice: you should use the language that you know best to make your life as uncomplicated as possible when you want to understand what the LLM was creating.

Remember, you are the judge whether the code is OK and if you use assembler you might get really performant code, but can you trust it?

Of course it might be a good incentive to learn rust or go. Or challenge yourself to learn something really cool like LISP, COBOL, FORTRAN, APL or J. (just kidding...)

just my 2 ct...

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#22

The ideal language for AI coding: 1. Type safety as basic guard rails that LLM output is syntactically and schematically correct 2. Concise since you have to review a lot more code 3. Easy to debug / good observability since you can't rely on your understanding of the code. Something functional where you can observe the state at any moment would be ideal. 4. A very large set of public code examples across various dom…

Golang. People trash it for being verbose on errors but it's an extremely readable language and it's almost like bash, only much stronger typed and with a very rich stdlib (so it's not likely you'll need a library for a quick script).

It's more or less a perfect replacement for Python for "one-off programs" and "quick scripts". Many bonus points for not having to fight shell quotation rules and trying to remember differences between sh, bash and zsh.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#24

The ideal language for AI coding: 1. Type safety as basic guard rails that LLM output is syntactically and schematically correct 2. Concise since you have to review a lot more code 3. Easy to debug / good observability since you can't rely on your understanding of the code. Something functional where you can observe the state at any moment would be ideal. 4. A very large set of public code examples across various dom…

I’d also argue it needs to compile fast/ have fast static analysis. Feedback loops like this are super helpful for agents

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#25
I know a couple languages fairly well: C, Perl, Python, Bash. I never formally learned Go, but as a test of AI coding, I started some vibe coded projects in Go. It worked very well: the code is minimal, there's few dependencies, and it compiles down to a static app. But most importantly, I can actually read the Go code and understand basically what it's doing. I can also use LLMs to critique the code if I'm uncertain. The big benefit of Go is the simpler language and "batteries included" standard library. This leads to fewer dependencies and less lines of code, which improves overall AI output. In theory, AI should be able to write better code faster in Go than in another language like Rust.

Python does have a much larger ecosystem of course, so with Go you have to develop from scratch what already exists in Python. But for smaller projects, you can also have an AI write a clean-room implementation in Go of some project in Python. So you aren't necessarily locked into one ecosystem anymore.

And in my experience, you don't even need to know the language. I have a co-worker who's basically not a programmer, but got multiple implementations of applications working sooner than our dev teams doing it by hand. You should be a coder so you can architect and orchestrate the coding, but 'language' isn't a barrier anymore.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#26

The ideal language for AI coding: 1. Type safety as basic guard rails that LLM output is syntactically and schematically correct 2. Concise since you have to review a lot more code 3. Easy to debug / good observability since you can't rely on your understanding of the code. Something functional where you can observe the state at any moment would be ideal. 4. A very large set of public code examples across various dom…

This is just Kotlin. Strongly typed, more concise than Java or Go (and probably Typescript), less likely to blow up at runtime than Typescript, epic tooling, plenty of public code, and a library for basically anything because JVM.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#27
post #6

This post resonates. I recently built a little web service to scratch an itch I've been having and after discussing the options with Claude we settled on Go, and honestly it's been fantastic. Highly performant, native threading, dead simple to deploy with containers. And I don't even know how to read or write Go.

Go is fun, you should actually learn it

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#28

The ideal language for AI coding: 1. Type safety as basic guard rails that LLM output is syntactically and schematically correct 2. Concise since you have to review a lot more code 3. Easy to debug / good observability since you can't rely on your understanding of the code. Something functional where you can observe the state at any moment would be ideal. 4. A very large set of public code examples across various dom…

> Concise since you have to review a lot more code

Isn't readability what matters here? Conciseness isn't the same thing.

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#29

AI's are really good with Python. Quick turnaround. Easy to read. Tons of training data/examples. Many of the same reasons we wrote Python before. Another benefit to using Python, is if you subscribe to writing/vibing a throwaway version first, a Python version is 100x better than a spec. (Disclaimer: I teach Python and AI for a living and am doing a tutorial at pycon this week, Beyond vibe coding. Am also using othe…

Problem with Python and other non-strict typed languages is that if you let an LLM to write some stuff, you cannot truly be confident that nothing has broken. Even if your tests all pass. The LLM could have broken some path that only gets run in production in a very specific case. At least with strongly-typed languages you get a compiler error. In big codebases is non-negotiable

Re: If AI writes your code, why use Python?

#30
1) python is one of the foremost trained upon languages

2) it's practically verbose, not technically

3) it resembles pseudocode

4) batteries included shortcuts a lot of work

all of these reasons are a boon for LLM work.

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