If AI writes your code, why use Python? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by autoexec » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

iLemming wrote: post #66

niek_pas wrote: post #2

Bit off topic but why in the world are people still posting on medium? The reading experience is abhorrent; I couldn’t even finish reading this article before a full screen popup literally blocked the sentence I was reading. Is there some incentive I’m not seeing?

> The reading experience is abhorrent Nothing you read in the browser can provide ultimately great and hands-down the best reading experience equally for everybody - the modern web model is inherently at odds with that. A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.…

> A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.

They don't ship it because of greed. They only want your attention because of greed. They only infest their website with ads because of greed.

> The browser is a delivery mechanism,

http is a delivery mechanism. The browser is a user agent. It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user. If your browser isn't doing that for you it's time to find a new browser or beat the one you have into submission until it behaves. "reader mode" is a useful compromise.

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

#132

Post by ambicapter » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

not2b wrote: post #103

_boffin_ wrote: post #80

Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data. I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python. My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

That would matter if we were asking the AI to generate code open-loop: someone probably already wrote something close to what you asked for in Python. But if the agent generates code, tries to compile it, sees the detailed error messages and acts on those messages to refine the code, it's going to produce a higher quality result. rustc produces really good diagnostics. And there's a lot of Rust code online now, even…

LLMs don't actually semantically parse the error messages. They will generate the most likely sequence resulting from the error message based on their training data, so you're back to the training data argument.

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

#133

Post by winrid » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

Claude writes java pretty well, and faster than Rust. It's a great middle ground for some projects. I've switched back from Rust to Java for some things.

I don't know why you would use Python at all except for small iterative projects. If you hate java for some reason, there's Go...

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

#134

Post by tnelsond4 » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

Yeah, last year I discovered that AI writes better rust than C, so I switched to rust and it made some quick good code that it couldn't do in C.

But when I wanted to optimize and edit and reorganize bthe code it was difficult, so I did a rewrite in C and it was lighter and faster and simpler and less headache.

C for humans, rust for AI.

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

#135

Post by isaisabella » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

Really agree. Python is popular because it's easy for human to implement. But now if the coder becomes AI, then Rust would be preferable for agent, just like Python for human. In addition, it brings better performance.

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

#136

Post by brightball » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

Didn’t Tencent do a study comparing AI performance across about 20 languages showing that Elixir was the top performer?

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

#137

Post by ambicapter » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:26 AM UTC

lmm wrote: post #116

chromacity wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are really good at translating to different programming languages. ...for which ample training data is available. > This makes sense, given that they are derived from text translation systems. ...for languages with ample training data available. Yes, LLMs can combine information in novel ways. They are wonderful in many respects. But they make far more mistakes if they can't lean on copious amounts of training…

That might be an argument for not using a novel homebrew programming language. But it's not an argument against, like, any top-100 or even top-1000 programming language, which will be adequately represented in the training data.

It is if more training data results in better performance. In which case, GP will continue to use the language that is likely to have the most training data available.

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

#138

Post by lmm » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:28 AM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #137

lmm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That might be an argument for not using a novel homebrew programming language. But it's not an argument against, like, any top-100 or even top-1000 programming language, which will be adequately represented in the training data.

It is if more training data results in better performance. In which case, GP will continue to use the language that is likely to have the most training data available.

> It is if more training data results in better performance.

Sure. But given the relation with translation systems, it seems far more likely that there are diminishing returns to larger volumes of training data.

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

#139

Post by gerdesj » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

_boffin_ wrote: post #80

Read the first few comments and surprised I didn’t see it, but training data. The voluminous amount of Python in the training data. I could write in brainfuck with ai, but I presume, wouldn’t get the same results than if going with python. My follow up question: with AI now, why care about a lang until you need to?

"I could write in brainfuck with ai"

Well, go on and do the experiment! Perhaps LLMs can right code as well in BF as Python but I don't recommend it because hallucinations are really hard to notice in BF.

If you are going to worry about high level computer languages and AI, you are going to have to start with getting to grips with machine code and assemblers and that. Once you know how say some Python code ends up being processed by your laptop CPU(s), then you will know when BF might be best!

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

#140

Post by neutronicus » Tue, May 12, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #132

not2b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would matter if we were asking the AI to generate code open-loop: someone probably already wrote something close to what you asked for in Python. But if the agent generates code, tries to compile it, sees the detailed error messages and acts on those messages to refine the code, it's going to produce a higher quality result. rustc produces really good diagnostics. And there's a lot of Rust code online now, even…

LLMs don't actually semantically parse the error messages. They will generate the most likely sequence resulting from the error message based on their training data, so you're back to the training data argument.

Perhaps the training data about what compiler diagnostics mean is particularly semantically rich training data.