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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how much things have changed but I tried to use GPT-4 when it first came out to build a library on top of Scala + Shapeless and it utterly failed. Unless you can somehow wire in an LSP per language as an agent and have it work through the type errors as it tries to create code, I can't see where we'll ever get to a place where LLMs can work with strongly typed languages and produce compliant code.

Even with, the aforementioned "have an LSP agent work through type errors", it may be faster to just do it yourself than wait for an LLM to spit out what may be correct.

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Definitely try Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview. They have succeeded for me where other models have failed. Also, use Cursor IDE.

o1-mini is even higher in coding benchmarks than o1-preview. That has been my experience also.

Oh, I’ve found Claude 3.5 to be better but still pointless. To be specific, it generates code that does what I ask (roughly) but…

- Has obvious bugs, many at runtime - Has subtle bugs. - Is inefficient.

All of which it will generally fix when asked. But how useful is it if I need to know all the problems with its code beforehand? Then it responds with the same-ish wrong answer the next time.

Still a long way to go IMO.

Claude 3.5 is good, however, it's "Type comprehension" is really basic. That was my experience with it when using Rust. It still can't create an internal mental model of the types and how to link them together. It'll also, at some points, start to heavily hallucinate functions and stuff.

Glad to know I’m not the only one who has had difficulties getting reasonable Scala code from an LLM. While I agree that LSP integration would likely help with generating or debugging production-quality code, I’d also suggest that the need for an LSP demonstrates these models’ inability to reason—at least about code. Perhaps they were trained more deeply and carefully on the marketing or “getting started” pages for the libraries and languages I need to use and not as much on examples of production-quality code repositories that make use of those languages/libs/tools.

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