My experience is that AI agents are not that good with Go. Not sure why but I think it is down to the low code quality of many major open source projects in Go.
A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
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Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs don't "reason".
Why is this a meaningful distinction to you? What does "reason" mean here? Can we construct a test that cleanly splits what humans do from what LLMs do?
Sure, things like counting the ‘r’s in strawberry, for example (till they are retrained not to make that mistake).
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#73If code is now free, why does the language matter at all?
Because you'll have to review it, and Go's design limits the number of ways it can go wrong.
Code is free, sure, but it's not guaranteed to be correct, and review time is not free.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#74TypeScript is what this author is looking for. Golang just gets bogged down in irrelevant details way too easily for this.
are you serious, hundreds of node_modules that I have no idea about, plus a runtime in the 100+ MBs alone.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#75I happen to just stumble across this article https://felixbarbalet.com/simple-made-inevitable-the-economi... extolling the virtues of Clojure. It specifically calls out Go for not being simple in the ways that matter for LLMs. I've no idea myself, I just thought it was interesting for comparison.
Is this your alt account?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47222705
Edit: cool article, I have myself speculated that we will get a new language made for/by llms that will be torture writing by hand/ide but easy to read/follow/navigate/check for a human and super easy for Llms to develop and maintain.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#76TypeScript is what this author is looking for. Golang just gets bogged down in irrelevant details way too easily for this.
Hi, author here, thanks! I have used TypeScript before across various projects, but I haven't considered building CLI tooling in that before, I guess due to my prejudice against the whole JS ecosystem. I plan to give it another try in the next weeks.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#77I have let Gemini, Claude Code and Codex hallucinate the language they wanted to for a few days. I prompted for "design the language you'd like to program in" and kept prompting "go ahead". Just rescued it from a couple too deep rabbit holes or asked it for some particular examples to stress it a bit. It´s a weird-ass Forth-like but with a strong type system, contracts, native testing, fuzz testing, and a constraint…
Have you asked them to compile it to BEAM bytecode directly?
It has been on the roadmap since they invented the thing. I fear it won't work but then they probably will do it in 10 minutes...
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built an agent with Go for the exact reasons laid out in the article, but did consider Rust. I would prefer it to be Rust actually. But the #1 reason I chose Go is token efficiency. My intuitive sense was that the LLM would have to spent a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes, interpreting and fixing compiler warnings, etc.
"LLM would have to spend a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes" Let's set aside the fact that Go is a garbage collected language while Rust is not for now... Do you prefer to let LLM reason about lifetimes, or debugging subtle errors yourself at runtime, like what happens with C++? People who are familiar with the C++ safety discussion understand that lifetimes are like types -- they are part of the code and are ju…
Fair point, and it depends on whether you're building code to last a decade, or creating a quick proof of concept.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#79Right now, I'd say the best language for AI is the one that you can review the fastest and rarely changes. Go is fairly readable imo and never changes so it is probably a good contender. But, I can't see any reason for anyone to learn it if they don't feel like it. Same goes for other "language X is good for AI" type posts.
Re: A case for Go as the best language for AI agents
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I built an agent with Go for the exact reasons laid out in the article, but did consider Rust. I would prefer it to be Rust actually. But the #1 reason I chose Go is token efficiency. My intuitive sense was that the LLM would have to spent a lot of time reasoning about lifetimes, interpreting and fixing compiler warnings, etc.
LLMs don't "reason".
Take it up with OpenAI's API designers—it's their term