So far, my conclusion is that while LLMs can be s productivity boost, you have to direct them carefully. They don't really care about friction and bad abstractions in your codebase and will happily keep piling cards on top of the crooked house of cards they've generated.

Just like before AI, you need a cycle of building and refactoring running on repeat with careful reviews. Otherwise you will end up with something that even an LLM will have a hard time working in.

Also, the post is 100% written by an LLM, which is ironic enough on its own. But that then makes it a bit more curious that you find this argument in this slop, because any LLM would say so. But if you badger it enough, it will concede to your demands, so you just know this clown was yelling at his LLM while writing this post.

He really should've thrown this post at a fresh session and asked for an honest, critical review.

Not only do they blame all of this on a stupid tool, but they also clearly couldn't even write this themselves. This is so obviously written by an LLM. Then there's the moronic notion of having the LLM explain itself.

Was the goal of this post to sabotage the business? Because I can barely come up with anything dumber than this post. Nobody with a brain and basic understanding of computers and LLMs would trust this person after this.

PS: "Confirm deletion" on an api call??? Lol. How vehemently it is argued in spite of how dumb that is is a typical example of someone badgering the LLM until it agrees. You can get them to take any position as long as you get mad enough.

Imma pass.

I, too, am a big fan of prolog and have (at least) yearly binges where I write a lot of it for fun and profit (and some frustration), but I do not consider myself to be an expert. But even I can see that the author has what I would consider a pretty basic understanding of prolog. Which makes it even more surprising they are writing a book that uses prolog.

In the end, you leave this thread knowing this as well, if you are at all capable of introspection.

I have written Haskell professionally for several years and worked with Idris and other similar languages. I'm perfectly aware of what is possible.

> The compiler would give you an error if you got the syntax wrong, and in isolation it's fair that you could, say, get the domain name wrong as long as it is syntactically valid. I suppose what I failed to convey, making some assumptions about your understanding of type systems, is that the types would not just specify RFC-compliance. You would also spec out other dependencies such that you also couldn't even provide the wrong domain name without a compiler error. So, no, the implementation of the function couldn't be wrong.

Wow, wouldn't that be something. This is hilariously wrong. You can build tiny functions and then compose those into larger functions and then the larger functions are all correct but only as long as their components are correct. It would be lovely if there was some magic construct that prevented you from writing incorrect code. Maybe it could be extended to hacker news comments, and then we could have just skipped this entire discussion.

> You could mis-spec the contract, of course. Then the function could be "wrong". Maybe this is the intent behind what you are trying to say here. But the idea has always been here that I would also read and accept the contract, so it wouldn't actually be "wrong". It would be exactly what we both expect. My side will be written to what the contact specifies. If you try to deviate from the contract later, you'll face the wrath of the compiler.

A truly baffling take. Bravo! Even on Hacker News, that was truly something. I don't even know where to begin. I guess I don't really have to, since when it comes to explaining the ease with which you transfer words straight from your ass to hacker news comments, it does a better job than I could possibly hope to do.

> As you point out, that's not the case in Typescript. If you try to change the contract (even if by accident) the compiler/typechecker will never say a word. I won't know until my code starts breaking. Your tests are the only thing you have to keep you in line with what we agreed upon. Tests define the contract in its case.

At this point, it's fairly clear that you are just thoroughly confused about how any of this works and what is actually possible. If you disagree, I'd love to hear how you would implement some sort of construct that allows you to write a function of the type `String -> Email` that doesn't throw if the email is invalid, can process arbitrary user input (not just string literals in your code), and somehow makes it a compiler error if your code is ever incorrect at all. PS: Explicitly returning and carrying around proof of validity doesn't count.

At some point, you will have to write a function where you validate/parse some arbitrary string, and it then returns some sort of `Email` type as a result. That function will probably return something like `Option` because you could feed it an invalid email.

The implementation for that function can also be wrong, in exactly the same way the implementation for the typescript equivalent could be wrong. You would have to test it just the same. The guarantees provided by the typescript function are exactly equivalent, except for the fact that you do technically have an escape hatch where you can "force" the creation of a branded `Email` without using the provided safe constructor, where the other language might completely prevent this - but I've already addressed this. In practice, it doesn't matter. You only make the safe constructor available to the user, so they would have to explicitly go out of their way to construct an invalid branded `Email`, and if they do, well, that's not really your problem.

TypeScript, for example, is one of the most widely used languages in the world. It has an incredibly powerful type system which you can use to model a lot of your invariants. By leaning on patterns such as correct-by-construction and branding, you can carry around type-level evidence that e.g. a number is within a certain range, or that the string you are carrying around is in fact a `UserId` and not just any other random string.

Can you intentionally break these guarantees if you go out of your way? Of course. But that's irrelevant, in the same way it is irrelevant that `any` can be used to break the type system guarantees. In practice, types are validated at the boundaries and everything inside can lean on those guarantees. The fact that someone can reach in and destroy those guarantees intentionally doesn't matter in practice.