As a developer, this gets frustrating. I want to present a clean and coherent output to my callers, and poorly-authored libraries ruin that — especially if they offer no mechanism to disable it.

It’s also just _sloppy_ in many cases. Well-designed library code often shouldn’t even need to log in the first place because it should clearly articulate each units side-effects; the composition of which should become clear to understand. Sadly, “design” has become a lost art in modern software development.

I have the same complaint at work, where coworkers are using it for writing pull request descriptions, and it pumps out slop buzzwords like “streamlined the documentation”. Like, you didn’t streamline anything, you ran prettier on a markdown file!

On top of this type of description being useless marketing jargon, the writing style risks to train future LLMs to devolve their writing styles further into this. More frighteningly, how long until the excess amount of LLM-generated slop text like this starts training future humans reading it? People tend to model how they speak off of what they hear and read, and it’s everywhere now.

It’s cool technology, but the burden of proof of real intelligence shouldn’t be “can it answer questions it has great swaths of information on”, because that is the result it was designed to do.

It should be focused on whether it can truly synthesize information and know its limitations - something any programmer using Claude, copilot, Gemini, etc will tell you that it fabricates false information/apis/etc on a regular basis and has no fundamental knowledge that it even did that.

Or alternatively, ask these models leading questions that have no basis in reality — and watch what it comes up with. It’s become a fun meme in some circles to ask for definitions of nonsensical made up phrases to models, and see what crap it comes up with (again, without even knowing that it is).

If we measure intelligence as results oriented, then my calculator is intelligent because it can do math better than me; but that’s what it’s programmed/wired to do. A text predictor is intelligent at predicting text, but it doesn’t mean it’s general intelligence. It lacks any real comprehension of the model or world around it. It just know words, and

Go has a similar function declaration, and it supports anonymous functions/lambdas.

E.g. in go, an anonymous func like this could be defined as

foo := func(x int, _ int) int { … }

So I’d imagine in Zig it should be feasible to do something like

var foo = fn(x: i32, i32) i32 { … }

unless I’m missing something?

Current LLMs can do some basic coding and stitch it together to form cool programs, but it struggles at good design work that scales. Design-focused interviews paired with soft-skill-focus is a better measure of how a dev will be in the workplace in general. Yet, most interviews are just “if you can solve this esoteric problem we don’t use at all at work, you are hired”. I’d take a bad solution with a good design over a good solution with a bad design any day, because the former is always easier to refactor and iterate on.

AI is not really good at that yet; it’s trained on a lot of public data that skews towards worse designs. It’s also not all that great at behaving like a human during code reviews; it agrees too much, is overly verbose, it hallucinates, etc.

I think there is a typo in the article though; there is a point that says:

> work out the problem by computing 6 × 5 = 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 30 (or 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 + 6 = 21)

The second parenthetical statement should be 30, unless I’m missing something?

The author proposes that braces are somehow subjectively harder to read for matching, and then says to just use a different delimiter of “end”. At which point, when you read nested code, you just see lots of “end” statements which are no different visually to seeing “}” closing braces, so what problem was solved exactly…?

I’m not saying it’s bad, it just doesn’t solve any practical problem, and it doesn’t improve anything objectively. This is just like debating why call a builtin type is “int” instead of “Int”. Most language-nerds I know tend to discuss more important details that can theoretically improve a language, and this is just stating a preference for Ruby “end” over C-style braces.

I feel like this needs to be reposted on April 1st

Been programming since I was in elementary school, and current Copilot, OpenAI and even Gemini models generate code at a very very junior level. It might solve a practical problem, but it can’t write a decent abstraction to save its life unless you repeatedly prompt it to. It also massively struggles to retain coherence when it has more moving parts; if you have different things being mutated, it often just forgets it and will write code that crashes/panics/generates UB/etc.

When you are lucky and you get something that vaguely works, the test cases it writes are of negative value. Test cases are either useless cases that don’t cover edge cases, are incorrect entirely and fail, or worse yet — look correct and pass, but are semantically wrong. LLM models have been absolutely hilariously bad at this, where it will generate passing cases for the code as written, but not for the semantics of the code being written. Writing it by hand would catch it quickly, but a junior dev using these tools can easily miss this.

Then there is Rust; most models don’t do rust well. In isolation they are kind of okay, but overall it frequently generates borrowing issues that fail to compile.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26706126

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26532217

Points: 2

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I've been working on this project for quite some time, and just wanted to share it with everyone because it's at a point that i feel is complete for a 1.0 release.

A little bit about it:

It's completely zero-overhead (no paying for what you don't use), constexpr supported, C++11 compatible (with more constexpr in newer versions), it optimizes extremely well (https://godbolt.org/z/TsonT1), it's extremely well-tested (https://coveralls.io/github/bitwizeshift/result?branch=maste...) both for static validation and runtime validation, and despite being based on the feature-sets from other modern languages, the design has kept a focus on keeping this idiomatic for modern C++

The design was originally based on the P0323 `std::expected` proposals, and over time grew into a standalone type that better modelled `result` in the end.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26435811

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26416855

Points: 2

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