9 comments

  • behnamoh 1 hour ago
    I wonder if the era of dynamic programming languages is over. Python/JS/Ruby/etc. were good tradeoffs when developer time mattered. But now that most code is written by LLMs, it's as "hard" for the LLM to write Python as it is to write Rust/Go (assuming enough training data on the language ofc; LLMs still can't write Gleam/Janet/CommonLisp/etc.).

    Esp. with Go's quick compile time, I can see myself using it more and more even in my one-off scripts that would have used Python/Bash otherwise. Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

    Compiled is back?

    • kenjackson 41 minutes ago
      Has anyone tried creating a language that would be good for LLMs? I feel like what would be good for LLMs might not be the same thing that is good for humans (but I have no evidence or data to support this, just a hunch).
      • simonw 39 minutes ago
        There was an interesting effort in that direction the other day: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/19/nanolang/
        • koolba 24 minutes ago
          There are two separate needs here. One is a language that can be used for computation where the code will be discarded. Only the output of the program matters. And the other is a language that will be eventually read or validated by humans.
          • conception 27 minutes ago
            I don’t know rust but I use it with llms a lot as unlike python, it has fewer ways to do things, along with all the built in checks to build.
          • nomel 1 hour ago
            > But now that most code is written by LLMs

            I'm sure it will eventually be true, but this seems very unlikely right now. I wish it were true, because we're in a time where generic software developers are still paid well, so doing nothing all day, with this salary, would be very welcome!

            • phainopepla2 36 minutes ago
              Code written by LLM != developer doing nothing
            • simonw 1 hour ago
              I have certainly become Go-curious thanks to coding agents - I have a medium sized side-project in progress using Go at the moment and it's been surprisingly smooth sailing considering I hardly know the language.

              The Go standard library is a particularly good fit for building network services and web proxies, which fits this project perfectly.

              • logicprog 51 minutes ago
                It's funny seeing you say that, because I've had an entire arc of despising the design of, and peremptorily refusing to use, Go, to really enjoying it, thanks to AI coding agents being able to take care of the boilerplate for me.

                It turns out that verbosity isn't really a problem when LLMs are the one writing the code based on more high level markdown specs (describing logic, architecture, algorithms, concurrency, etc), and Go's extreme simplicity, small range of language constructs, and explicitness (especially in error handling and control flow) make it much easier to quickly and accurately review agent code.

                It also means that Go's incredible (IMO) runtime, toolchain, and standard library are no longer marred by the boilerplate either, and I can begin to really appreciate their brilliance. It has me really reconsidering a lot of what I believed about language design.

                • simonw 42 minutes ago
                  Yeah, I much prefer Go to Rust for LLM things because I find Go code easy to read and understand despite having little experience with it - Rust syntax still trips me up.
                  • logicprog 33 minutes ago
                    Not to mention that, in general, there's a lot more to keep in mind with Rust.

                    I've written probably tens of thousands of lines of Rust at this point, and while I used to absolutely adore it, I've really completely fallen out of love with it, and part of it is that it's not just the syntax that's horrible to look at (which I only realized after spending some time with Go and Python), but you have to always keep in mind a lot of things:

                    - the borrow checker - lifetimes, - all the different kinds of types that represent different ways of doing memory management - parse out sometimes extremely complex and nearly point-free iterator chaining - deal with a complex type system that can become very unwieldy if you're not careful - and more I'm probably not thinking of right now

                    Not to mention the way the standard library exposes you to the full bore of all the platform-specific complexities it's designed on top of, and forces you to deal with them, instead of exposing a best-effort POSIX-like unified interface, so path and file handling can be hellish. (this is basically the reverse of fasterthanlime's point in the famous "I want off mr. golang's wild ride" essay).

                    It's just a lot more cognitive overhead to just getting something done if all you want is a fast statically compiled, modern programming language. And it makes it even harder to review code. People complain about Go boilerplate, but really, IME, Rust boilerplate is far, far worse.

                • Imustaskforhelp 53 minutes ago
                  100% check out Golang even more! I have been writing Golang AI coding projects for a really long time because I really loved writing different languages and Golang was one in which I settled on.

                  Golang's libraries are phenomenal & the idea of porting over to multiple servers is pretty easy, its really portable.

                  I actually find Golang good for CLI projects, Web projects and just about everything.

                  Usually the only time I still use python uvx or vibe code using that is probably when I am either manipulating images or pdf's or building a really minimalist tkinkter UI in python/uv

                  Although I tried to convert the python to golang code which ended up using fyne for gui projects and surprisingly was super robust but I might still use python in some niche use cases.

                  Check out my other comment in here for finding a vibe coded project written in a single prompt when gemini 3 pro was launched in the web (I hope its not promotion because its open source/0 telemetry because I didn't ask for any of it to be added haha!)

                  Golang is love. Golang is life.

                  • behnamoh 52 minutes ago
                    > considering I hardly know the language.

                    Same boat! In fact I used to (still do) dislike Go's syntax and error handling (the same 4 lines repeated every time you call a function), but given that LLMs can write the code and do the cross-model review for me, I literally don't even see the Go source code, which is nice because I'd hate it if I did (my dislike of Go's syntax + all the AI slop in the code would drive me nuts).

                    But at the end of the day, Go has good scaffolding, the best tooling (maybe on par with Rust's, definitely better than Python even with uv), and tons of training data for LLMs. It's also a rather simple language, unlike Swift (which I wish was simpler because it's a really nice language otherwise).

                  • c7b 48 minutes ago
                    Agree on compiled languages, wondering about Go vs Rust. Go compiles faster but is more verbose, token cost is an important factor. Rust's famously strict compiler and general safety orientation seems like a strong candidate for LLM coding. Go would probably have more training data out already though.
                    • cobolexpert 1 hour ago
                      I was also thinking this some days ago. The scaffolding that static languages provide is a good fit for LLMs in general.

                      Interestingly, since we are talking about Go specifically, I never found that I was spending too much typing... types. Obviously more than with a Python script, but never at a level where I would consider it a problem. And now with newer Python projects using type annotations, the difference got smaller.

                      • zahlman 1 hour ago
                        > And now with newer Python projects using type annotations, the difference got smaller.

                        Just FWIW, you don't actually have to put type annotations in your own code in order to use annotated libraries.

                      • ravenstine 1 hour ago
                        I'm not sure that LLMs are going to [completely] replace the desire for JIT, even with relatively fast compilers.

                        Frameworks might go the way of the dinosaur. If an LLM can manage a lot of complex code without human-serving abstractions, why even use something like React?

                        • mdtusz 10 minutes ago
                          Frameworks aren't just human-serving abstractions - they're structural abstractions that allow for performant code, or even being able to achieve certain behaviours.

                          Sure, you could write a frontend without something like react, and create a backend without something like django, but the code generated by an LLM will become similarly convoluted and hard to maintain as if a human had written it.

                          LLM's are still _quite_ bad at writing maintainable code - even for themselves.

                          • westurner 1 hour ago
                            Test cases; test coverage
                          • bitwize 8 minutes ago
                            Astronaut 1: You mean... strong static typing is an unmitigated win?

                            Astronaut 2: Always has been...

                            • dec0dedab0de 42 minutes ago
                              or maybe someone will use an LLM to create a JIT that works so well that compiled languages will be gone.
                              • zahlman 1 hour ago
                                People are still going to want to audit the code, at the very least.
                                • rvz 1 hour ago
                                  > Plus, I get a binary that I can port to other systems w/o problem.

                                  So cross-platform vibe-coded malware is the future then?

                                  • yibers 1 hour ago
                                    I hope that AVs will also evolve using the new AI tech to detect this type of malware.
                                    • Imustaskforhelp 50 minutes ago
                                      Honestly I looked at Go for malware and I mean AV detection for golang used to be ehh but recently It got strong.

                                      Then it became a cat and mouse game with obfuscators and deobfucsators.

                                      John Hammond has a *BRILLIANT* Video on this topic. 100% recommneded.

                                      Honestly Speaking from John Hammond I feel like Nim as a language or V-lang is something which will probably get vibe coded malware from. Nim has been used for hacking so much that iirc windows actually blocked the nim compiler as malware itself!

                                      Nim's biggest issue is that hackers don't know it but if LLM's fix it. Nim becomes a really lucrative language for hackers & John Hammond described that Nim's libraries for hacking are still very decent.

                                  • Imustaskforhelp 58 minutes ago
                                    I love golang man! And I use it for the same thing too!!

                                    I mean people mention rust and everything and how AI can write proper rust code with linter and some other thing but man trust me that AI can write some pretty good golang code.

                                    I mean though, I don't want everyone to write golang code with AI of all of a sudden because I have been doing it for over an year and its something that I vibe with and its my personal style. I would lose some points of uniqueness if everyone starts doing the same haha!

                                    Man my love for golang runs deep. Its simple, cross platform (usually) and compiles super fast. I "vibe code" but feel faith that I can always manage the code back.

                                    (self promotion? sorry about that: but created golang single main.go file project with a timer/pomodoro with websockets using gorilla (single dep) https://spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/)

                                    So Shhh let's keep it a secret between us shall we! ;)

                                    (Oh yeah! Recently created a WHMCS alternative written in golang to hook up to any podman/gvisor instance to build your own mini vps with my own tmate server, lots of glue code but it actually generated it in first try! It's surprisingly good, I will try to release it as open source & thinking of charging just once if people want everything set up or something custom

                                    Though one minor nitpick is that the complexity almost rises many folds between a single file project and anything which requires database in golang from what I feel usually but golang's pretty simple and I just LOVE golang.)

                                    Also AI's pretty good at niche languages too I tried to vibe code a fzf alternative from golang to v-lang and I found the results to be really promising too!

                                  • jmacd 1 hour ago
                                    I wonder how long npm/pip etc even makes sense.

                                    Dependancies introduce unnecessary LOC and features which are, more and more, just written by LLMs themselves. It is easier to just write the necessary functionality directly. Whether that is more maintainable or not is a bit YMMV at this stage, but I would wager it is improving.

                                    • kristianp 3 minutes ago
                                      At times I wonder why x tui coding agent was written in js/ts/python, why not use Go if it's mostly llm coded anyway? But that's mostly my frustration at having to wait for npm to install a thousand dependencies, instead of one executable plus some config files. There's also support libraries like terminal ui that differ in quality between platforms.
                                      • TZubiri 1 hour ago
                                        This is like saying Wikipedia doesn't make sense because there's now Grokipedia
                                        • there are people (on Hacker News Dot Com, even) who believe this without a shred of shame or irony.
                                      • Fernicia 53 minutes ago
                                        Has Gemini lost its ability to run javascript and python? I swear it could when it was launched by now its saying it hasn't the ability. Annoying regression when Claude and ChatGPT are so good at it.
                                        • tj800x 30 minutes ago
                                          This regression seems to have happened in the past few days. I suspected it was hallucinating the run and confirmed it by by asking Gemini to output the current date/time. The UTC it was reported was in the future from my clock. Some challenging mathematics were generating wrong results. Gemini will acknowledge something is wrong if you push it to explain the discrepancies, but can't explain it.
                                        • candiddevmike 1 hour ago
                                          Seems like everyone is trying to get ahead of tool calling moving people "off platform" and creating differentiators around what tools are available "locally" to the models etc. This also takes the wind out of the sandboxing folks, as it probably won't be long before the "local" tool calling can effectively do anything you'd need to do on your local machine.

                                          I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

                                          • simonw 1 hour ago
                                            Claude Code for the web is kind of a persistent virtual dev environment already.

                                            You can start a session there and chat with it to get a bunch of work done, then come back to that session a day later and the virtual filesystem is in the same state as when you left it.

                                            I haven't figured out if this has a time limit on it - it's possible they're doing something clever with object storage such that the cost of persisting those environments is really low, see also Fly's Sprites.dev: https://fly.io/blog/design-and-implementation/

                                            • esperent 13 minutes ago
                                              It's so incredibly buggy though. I end up with hung sessions "starting claude code" every second or third time. After a few times of losing work I'm done with it. I'll check back in a few months and see if it's in better shape.
                                            • yoyohello13 1 hour ago
                                              > I wonder when they'll start offering virtual, persistent dev environments...

                                              A lot of companies have been wanting to move in this direction. Instead of maintaining a fleet of machines, you just get a bunch of thin clients and pay Microsoft of whoever to host the actual workloads. They already do this 'kiosk' style stuff for a lot of front-line staff.

                                              Honestly, not having my own local hardware for development sounds like a living hell, but seems like the way we are going.

                                              • simonw 1 hour ago
                                                Coding agents are a particularly good fit for disposable development environments because of the risk of them messing things up. If the entire environment is ephemeral the worst that can happen (aside from private source code leaks to a malicious third party) is the environment gets trashed and you have to start over in a new one.
                                                • ljm 40 minutes ago
                                                  Coming full circle to renting time from a mainframe.
                                                  • Imustaskforhelp 43 minutes ago
                                                    We are gonna have YOLO agents who will deploy directly to website (technically exe.dev already does that for me when I ask it to generate golang projects lol)

                                                    Honestly I felt like it really bores me or (overwhelms?) me because now I feel like okay now I will do this, then that and then that & drastically expand the scope of the project but that comes with its own fatigue and the limits of free tokens or context with exe.dev so I end up publishing it on git provider, git ingest it paste it in web browser gemini ask it for updates (it has 1 million context) and then paste it with Opencode with an openrouter devstral key.

                                                    I used this workflow to drastically improve the UI of a project but like I would consider that aside from some tinkering, I felt like the "fun" of a project definitely got reduced.

                                                    It was always fun for me to use LLM's as I was in loop (Didn't use agents, copy paste workflow from web) but now agents kind of replicated that too & have gotten (I must admit) pretty good at it.

                                                    I don't know man, any thoughts on how to make such things fun again? When LLM's first came or even before using agents like this with just creating single scripts, It was fun to use them but creating whole projects with huge scope feels very fun sucking imo.

                                                • xnx 56 minutes ago
                                                  How much compute do you get in these containers? Could I have it run whisper on an mp3 it downloads?
                                                  • simonw 50 minutes ago
                                                    That might work! You would have to figure out how to get Whisper working in there but I'm sure that's possible with a bit of creativity concerning uploading files and maybe running a build with the available C compiler.

                                                    It appears to have 4GB of RAM and 56 (!?) CPU cores https://chatgpt.com/share/6977e1f8-0f94-8006-9973-e9fab6d244...

                                                    • tintor 16 minutes ago
                                                      Cores are shared with other containers.
                                                      • Imustaskforhelp 48 minutes ago
                                                        Huh...

                                                        If people are getting this for free or even as an offering with chatgpt consideirng it becomes subsidized too. Lowend providers are a little in threat with their 7$/year deals if Chatgpt provides 56 cores for free. this doesn't seem right to provide so many cores for (free??)

                                                        Are you running this in your free account as you mention in blog post simon or in your paid account?

                                                        • simonw 44 minutes ago
                                                          My $20/month paid account.

                                                          I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).

                                                          • Imustaskforhelp 36 minutes ago
                                                            Oh thanks for your reply Simon!

                                                            > I used a free account to check if the feature was available there and it tried to get me to upgrade two prompts in (just enough for me to confirm the container worked and could install packages).

                                                            Wait it tried... to make you upgrade your chatgpt account from free to paid account? Sorry I didn't get what you meant here

                                                            (Funnily I asked chatgpt about what it thinks of your text and it says that It thinks that it tries to ask you to pay up)

                                                            Is this thing (maybe some additions to make it like sprites.dev?) + some ad features for basic query gonna be how openAI Monetizes?

                                                            I mean I am part of lowend community (so indie community of hosting providers) and they are all really pissed and some shutting down because of ram prices increases. OpenAI has all the ram in the world right now so is it trying to be a monopoly in this instance?

                                                            I just found it to be really dystopian that it asked you to pay. Can you share me a pic of it if possible or share the free conversation. Heck, I might have to try it now on my free account as well.

                                                            Curiosity's piqued right now.

                                                            • simonw 15 minutes ago
                                                              On my free ChatGPT account I ran a prompt telling it to write and execute hello world in a bunch of languages: https://chatgpt.com/share/6977aa7c-7bd8-8006-8129-8c9e25126f...

                                                              It did what I asked - proving that the container feature works even for free accounts - but then displayed a message saying that I was as out of free prompts and would need to upgrade or wait before I could run more.

                                                          • goinghjuk 34 minutes ago
                                                            by default containers do not limit core count, you'll get all available on the host/VM.

                                                            these cores are shared with all the other containers, could be hundreds more

                                                      • randomtoast 1 hour ago
                                                        Maybe soon we have single use applications. Where ChatGPT can write an App for you on-the-fly in a cloud sandbox you interact with it in the browser and fulfill your goal and afterwards the App is shutdown and thrown away.
                                                      • skybrian 1 hour ago
                                                        Not sure if this is still working. I tried getting it to install cowsay and it ran into authentication issues. Does it work for other people?
                                                        • simonw 1 hour ago
                                                          Can you share the transcript?
                                                        • simonw 3 hours ago
                                                          Regular default ChatGPT can also now run code in Node.js, Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++.

                                                          I'm not sure when these new features landed because they're not listed anywhere in the official ChatGPT release notes, but I checked it with a free account and it's available there as well.

                                                          • nottorp 1 hour ago
                                                            ... as root?
                                                            • tintor 10 minutes ago
                                                              No root. `pip` and `npm install` don't require it.

                                                              You can not use `sudo apt install` inside it.

                                                              They use gVisor, and other container isolation mechanisms: https://ryan.govost.es/2025/openai-code-interpreter/

                                                              • zahlman 1 hour ago
                                                                Given that it's within a container on a remote server, does that matter?
                                                                • acedTrex 47 minutes ago
                                                                  I mean i hope its more hardened than JUST a container given how many container escapes there are.
                                                                  • jchw 4 minutes ago
                                                                    Apparently, they are using gVisor, which when applied properly, should make a pretty good isolation primitive.