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Comment by daliusd | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it is language specific? Maybe LLMs have a lot of good JavaScript/TypeScript samples for training and it works for those devs (e.g. me). I heard that Scala devs have problems with LLMs writing code too. I am puzzled by good devs not managing to get LLM work for them.

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I definitely think it's language specific. My history may deceive me here, but i believe that LLMs are infinitely better at pumping out python scripts than java. Now i have much, much more experience with java than python, so maybe it's just a case of what you don't know.... However, The tools it writes in python just work for me, and i can incrementally improve them and the tools get rationally better and more aligned with what i want.

I then ask it to do the same thing in java, and it spends a half hour trying to do the same job and gets caught in some bit of trivia around how to convert html escape characters, for instance, s.replace("<", "<").replace(">", ">").replace("\"").replace("""); as an example and endlessly compiles and fails over and over again, never able to figure out what it has done wrong, nor decides to give up on the minutia and continue with the more important parts.

Maybe it's because there's no overall benefit to these things.

There's been a lot of talk about it for the past few years but we're just not seeing impacts. Oh sure, management talk it up a lot, but where's the corresponding increase in feature delivery? Software stability? Gross profit? EBITDA?

Give me something measurable and I'll consider it.

I think LLMs have a hard time with large code bases (obviously so do devs).

A giant monorepo would be a bad fit for an LLM IMO.

With agentic search, they actually do pretty well with monorepos.

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