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Comment by 0xFEE1DEAD | Hacker News Reader

I wish they wouldn't use JS to demonstrate the AI's coding abilities - the internet is full of JS code and at this point I expect them to be good at it. Show me examples in complex (for lack of a better word) languages to impress me.

I recently used OpenAI models to generate OCaml code, and it was eye opening how much even reasoning models are still just copy and paste machines. The code was full of syntax errors, and they clearly lacked a basic understanding of what functions are in the stdlib vs those from popular (in OCaml terms) libraries.

Maybe GPT-5 is the great leap and I'll have to eat my words, but this experience really made me more pessimistic about AI's potential and the future of programming in general. I'm hoping that in 10 years niche languages are still a thing, and the world doesn't converge toward writing everything in JS just because AIs make it easier to work with.

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> I wish they wouldn't use JS to demonstrate the AI's coding abilities - the internet is full of JS code and at this point I expect them to be good at it. Show me examples in complex (for lack of a better word) languages to impress me.

Agreed. The models break down on not even that complex of code either, if it's not web/javascript. Was playing with Gemini CLI the other day and had it try to make a simple Avalonia GUI app in C#/.NET, kept going around in circles and couldn't even get a basic starter project to build so I can imagine how much it'd struggle with OCaml or other more "obscure" languages.

This makes the tech even less useful where it'd be most helpful - on internal, legacy codebases, enterprisey stuff, stacks that don't have numerous examples on github to train from.

> on internal, legacy codebases, enterprisey stuff

Or anything that breaks the norm really.

I recently wrote something where I updated a variable using atomic primitives. Because it was inside a hot path I read the value without using atomics as it was okay for the value to be stale. I handed it the code because I had a question about something unrelated and it wouldn't stop changing this piece of code to use atomic reads. Even when I prompted it not to change the code or explained why this was fine it wouldn't stop.

FWIW, and this depends on the language obviously, but formal memory models typically do forbid races between atomic and non-atomic accesses to the same memory location.

While what you were doing may have been fine given your context, if you're targeting e.g. standard C++, you really shouldn't be doing it (it's UB). You can usually get the same result with relaxed atomic load/store.

(As far as AI is concerned, I do agree that the model should just have followed your direction though.)

> the internet is full of JS code and at this point I expect them to be good at it.

Isn't that the rub though? It's not an ex nihlo "intelligence", it's whatever stuff it's trained on and can derive completions from.

Yes, for me it is and it was even before this experience. But, you know, there's a growing crowd that believes AI is almost at AGI level and that they'll vibe code their way to a Fortune 100 company.

Maybe I spend too much time rage baiting myself reading X threads and that's why I feel the need to emphasize that AI isn't what they make it out to be.

> they'll vibe code their way to a Fortune 100 company

You don't need more than JS for that.

The snake game they showcased - if you ask Qwen3-coder-30b to generate a snake game in JS - it generates the exact same layout, the exact same two buttons below, and the exact same text under the 2 buttons. It just regurgigates its training data.

I used ChatGPT to convert an old piece of OCaml code of mine to Rust and while it didn't really work—and I didn't expect it to—it seemed a very reasonable starting point to actually do the rest of the work manually.

I've tried with many models to program in mathematica and sagemath; they're terrible, even with lots of hints.

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