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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

With agents it no longer makes sense to tie yourself to Python's archaic development experience. How many type checkers are there? Package managers? Don't even get me started on cross-platform deployment.

Strongly typed, compiled languages have never been easier to use, and agents reap huge benefits from the tight feedback loop that the compiler provides. Moreover the benefits of the Python ecosystem are less significant today than anytime in the past 20 years. Need something that's only available in Python? Just point some agents at it and you can port it.

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What about the several people worldwide who don't want to use LLMs to program?

They also "reap huge benefits from the tight feedback loop that the compiler provides".

When something is easier/requires less context, it tends to work well for both human and LLM.

I've noticed this a lot in LLM generated Java. Since it doesn't know what can or can't be null it tends to wrap everything in Optional<T>. Super strong type systems are becoming even more important.

You probably need to tell it to rip as many of those out as possible (and replace them with null annotations).

I've noticed LLMs sometimes pick a documented anti-pattern (passing Optional around in Java is not recommended), then amplify it (like a human might).

That's because LLMs suck.

> Just point some agents at it and you can port it.

Don’t think we’re there yet, otherwise we would see a bunch of forks of major libraries to alternative languages - and not just Python. There’s still too much risk of insidious errors and bugs.

I've done thus a few times for stuff in the < 10,000 LOC space. It works great.

There's something particularly satisfying about shipping a 1-10MB static rust binary instead of a 2GiB docker python environment.

(I'm talking about just porting simple applications, or maybe a missing package/crate at a time. Not both at once, and not typical 100K-10M line internal legacy sprawl)

What have you ported, for example? Any 3PL or all internal code?

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